Trump Ends 2023 With A Fresh Ballot Disaster · The Daily Fuckup

Edition · December 29, 2023

Trump Ends 2023 With A Fresh Ballot Disaster

A Colorado Supreme Court ruling yanked Trump off the state primary ballot, and the legal blast radius was immediate. The fight now heads toward the U.S. Supreme Court, but the damage for Trump’s campaign and messaging was already plain by year’s end.

The last big Trump-world screwup of 2023 was a brutal one: Colorado’s top court ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. That set off an instant legal and political scramble, with emergency appeals, a pending U.S. Supreme Court fight, and a fresh reminder that Trump’s biggest 2024 vulnerability was still the Jan. 6 attack he keeps trying to memory-hole. The broader fallout wasn’t just ballot access; it was the spectacle of a leading presidential candidate spending the holiday week litigating whether he can legally run at all.

Closing take

By December 29, Trump’s campaign had turned a court defeat into a headline problem that could not be spun away. The state ruling was paused, the appeals were coming fast, and the Supreme Court would get the final word. But for one ugly stretch, Trump’s closing argument to voters was not strength — it was whether the Constitution itself says he is not allowed to do the job again.

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Colorado Ballot Ruling Drops Trump Into Constitutional Freefall

ballot disqualification Confidence 5/5

★★★★★Fuckup rating 5/5 Five-alarm fuckup

Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s presidential primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a stunning decision that gave his 2024 campaign a very public legal wound at the exact moment he wanted to project inevitability. The ruling was immediately stayed while the case heads toward the U.S. Supreme Court, but the political damage was already done: Trump spent the end of the year fighting over whether he can legally appear on ballots at all.

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Maine’s Ballot Ruling Turns Trump’s Legal Wound Into A Two-State Problem

two-state ballot fight Confidence 4/5

★★★★★Fuckup rating 5/5 Five-alarm fuckup

On the same day Colorado’s ruling dominated the news, Maine’s election chief also blocked Trump from the GOP primary ballot, making the issue look less like a one-off and more like a widening legal threat. The twin decisions supercharged the argument that Trump’s Jan. 6 conduct has real electoral consequences, even before the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in.

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