The Daily Fuckup

On March 6, 2024, Donald Trump was already using the Supreme Court’s March 4 ballot ruling as proof that another effort to block him had failed. That was a real victory for his campaign. It was not a broader legal exoneration.

The court’s decision in Trump v. Anderson dealt with one question only: whether Colorado could keep Trump off the primary ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices said no. They did not decide whether Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election was lawful, and they did not dispose of the separate criminal and civil matters still pending around him.

That mattered because the ballot case and the prosecution case are not the same fight. Jack Smith’s federal election-interference case remained in place, along with other disputes that had nothing to do with Colorado’s ballot rules. The Supreme Court’s ruling changed Trump’s ballot status in Colorado. It did not clear him of the underlying allegations or stop the other cases from moving forward.

So Trump got what he could sell politically: a courtroom win he could turn into a campaign line. What he did not get was a ruling that answered the larger questions about his post-2020 conduct. The March 4 decision closed one path to disqualification. It left the rest of the legal calendar alone.