The Daily Fuckup

By April 6, 2024, the immediate effort to keep Donald Trump off presidential primary ballots under the Fourteenth Amendment was already over. On March 4, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Colorado ruling that had ordered Trump excluded from that state’s Republican primary ballot, holding that states do not have power to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, especially the presidency. That ended the ballot-removal threat in the case at the center of the fight. It did not end the larger argument about Trump’s conduct or the politics around Jan. 6.

That distinction mattered. The case had forced courts and voters to confront a basic question: whether Trump’s role after the 2020 election fit the kind of conduct Section 3 was written to bar. The Supreme Court did not decide the issue the way Trump’s critics wanted, and it did not declare the political controversy closed. What it did do was remove one legal path for states to exclude him from federal ballots under that provision. The ruling settled the ballot-access dispute, but not the public memory of why the dispute existed.

For Trump, the practical win was obvious. He stayed on the ballot, and state officials could not use that Section 3 theory to block him from presidential primaries. But the episode still served as a reminder that a presidential campaign can become entangled in constitutional litigation in ways most candidates never face. Multiple courts had already taken the challenge seriously enough to litigate it through trial and appeal, and the Supreme Court’s involvement guaranteed even more attention. That process kept Jan. 6 in the political bloodstream well after the legal question was resolved.

The result was a familiar Trump pattern: a courtroom victory that did not translate into clean reputational repair. Supporters could point to the unanimous ruling as vindication. Critics could point to the fact that the country had just spent months arguing over whether Trump’s post-election conduct could disqualify him from office. Both things were true. The immediate ballot-ban threat was gone by April 6. The political and historical consequences of the fight were not. In that sense, the case ended on paper in March, but its shadow continued to hang over the campaign in April.