A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
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.
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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5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
The Colorado Supreme Court said on Dec. 19, 2023, that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s presidential primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it stayed enforcement of the ruling until Jan. 4, 2024, unless the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in first.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled on Dec. 28, 2023, that Donald Trump could not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot, one week after Colorado’s Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion. Both rulings were immediately caught up in appeals, but together they widened a fight over whether Trump’s conduct around Jan. 6 bars him from the ballot.