Trump supporters blame Democrats after Colorado supreme court disqualifies him from 2024 election ballot

Donald Trump declared Wednesday “a sad day in America” after the Colorado supreme court disqualified him from the presidential ballot next year over the January 6th insurrection.

Though Mr Trump did not address the decision during a rally on Tuesday night in Iowa, where he ranted against immigration, he has posted multiple all-caps declarations of fury on his social media platform Truth Social since the decision was issued late on Tuesday.

“What a shame for our country!!!” Trump wrote on Wednesday. As with his 91 criminal charges and assorted civil trials, Mr Trump also seized on the Colorado ruling for fundraising purposes.

“Breaking news: Colorado just removed me from the ballot! Chip in now,” the post read.

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In a lengthy ruling ordering the Colorado secretary of state to exclude Mr Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, the justices reversed a Denver district judge’s finding last month that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment – which disqualifies people who have engaged in insurrection against the constitution after having taken an oath to support it from holding office – did not apply to the presidency.

They affirmed the district judge’s other key conclusions: that courts had the authority to enforce Section 3 against a person whom Congress had not specifically designated.

The section was included in the constitution after the American civil war to prevent Confederate leaders from holding office in the Government they had rebelled against.

Mr Trump is expected to appeal to the US supreme court. Tuesday’s ruling applies only to Colorado, but if the US supreme court were to affirm it, he could be disqualified more broadly. The Colorado supreme court stayed its ruling until January 4th to allow time for appeals.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said on Tuesday night that the campaign has “full confidence that the US supreme court will quickly rule in our favour and finally put an end to these un-American lawsuits”.

Despite confidence from Mr Trump’s team over a future supreme court decision, reactions from the Colorado ruling have so far shown just how murky the legal debate surrounding it will be.

Mr Trump’s Truth Social feed is already reflecting this. On Tuesday night, Mr Trump quoted Jonathan Turley, a conservative law professor at George Washington University who has appeared as a witness for House Republicans seeking to impeach US president Joe Biden over nebulous claims of corruption.

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“This country is a powder keg and this court is just throwing matches at it ... for people that say they are trying to protect democracy, this is hands down the most anti-democratic opinion I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Mr Trump wrote, quoting Mr Turley speaking on Fox News.

But Mr Trump truncated a portion of Turley’s interview where he said that though he believed the Colorado court was wrong, “January 6th was many things, most of it not good”.

“In my view, it was not an insurrection. It was a riot,” Mr Turley said. “That doesn’t mean that the people responsible for their day shouldn’t be held accountable. But to call this an insurrection for the purposes of disqualification would create a slippery slope for every state in the union.”

Mr Turley’s argument is that while Trump incited a riot, it technically does not amount to the insurrection specified in the 14th amendment.

“If you dislike Trump, you believe he’s responsible for January 6th ... this isn’t the way to do it,” he said.

This is just one of the points that will be debated if Mr Trump’s appeal is taken up by the supreme court, which has been facing an onslaught of accusations of politics in the court. As much as the Colorado ruling puts a spotlight on Trump, it will also set up the US supreme court – which has historically tried to maintain itself as a neutral arbiter of the law – to take on yet another case entrenched in politics.

Mr Trump appointed three out of the court’s nine current justices, cementing a six-to-three conservative majority in the court that has overturned abortion and affirmative action in the last three years. The supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has also been facing criticism over the last year for taking gifts and vacations from billionaires, as well as for the conservative activism of his wife, Ginni Thomas.

The court is also set to rule on another Trump appeal, which will decide whether he is immune to prosecution over any charges that come from his Washington, DC criminal trial over the January 6th insurrection.

Republicans are already framing the Colorado court’s decision as a Democratic attack against Mr Trump. The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pledged to remove himself from the Republican primary in Colorado and asked his fellow candidates to do the same in solidarity with Trump, “else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal manoeuvre which will have disastrous consequences for our country”.

Elise Stefanik, a leading Republican representative from New York, said in a statement: “Democrats are so afraid that president Trump will win on Nov 5th, 2024 that they are illegally attempting to take him off the ballot.”

Regardless of whether the Colorado ruling is upheld, the debate will probably force close scrutiny of Mr Trump’s involvement in the January 6th attack. Mr Trump maintains that the more than 1,000 people who were arrested after the attack, including 600 who were eventually sentenced, are political prisoners. He also continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen, a belief that incited those who carried out the January 6th attack in the first place.

“Election interference!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday night.

– Guardian