The Supreme Court on Monday ruled unanimously that Colorado can’t remove former president Donald Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, dashing the hopes of media pundits and liberal commentators who spent months claiming the case to disqualify the former president was a “slam dunk.”
Even before the Colorado Supreme Court initially ruled in December that Trump would be disqualified from the ballot, CNN pushed the case for Trump’s disqualification in an August story titled, “Legal Scholars Increasingly Raise Constitutional Argument That Trump Should Be Barred From Presidency.” In a piece around the same time, the Atlantic claimed, “The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again,” asserting that “the only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.” New York Times opinion columnist David French declared, “The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong.”
Following the Colorado court’s 4-3 ruling that kicked Trump off the ballot, the only question for many in the media was whether partisan politics would get in the way of an obviously correct decision. The New York Times cited an expert who claimed the case to disqualify Trump was “legally sound” but likely to be rejected by “a six-justice conservative supermajority.” A Washington Post headline repeated the “legally sound” claim and said in the subhead that “experts say there’s a strong basis for the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to bar Trump from the ballot.” An ABC News piece asserted that “experts disagreed with” the “sentiment” of the minority opinion in the case that the choice should be up to voters. When it came to Trump and his team’s objections to his disqualification, ABC’s “experts” were there again: “Some legal experts have called that criticism ‘misguided.'”
Hosts on CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets were quick to claim that “experts” approved of Trump’s disqualification. Apparently, even the Supreme Court’s most liberal justices believed otherwise.
