Donald Trump disqualified: How does bombshell Colorado Supreme Court ruling affect his White House run

A Supreme Court-sized obstacle now likely lies in wait for Donald Trump’s opponents after he was barred from standing to be president in Colorado.

On the face of it, the decision by top judges in Colorado was epochal – no court in the United States had previously ruled that Trump is an “insurrectionist” and thus barred from standing for office.

The ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court was tied to the stormy events of January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Congress building on Capitol Hill after hearing him give an inflammatory speech rejecting his clear loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Colorado itself is reliably Democratic so the case won’t sway the electoral maths of the November 2024 showdown, which appears set again to pit Trump against President Biden.

But it could set a precedent for courts elsewhere. Voters and advocacy groups have sued to block the Republican from the White House ballot in more than 12 states, although their attempts have failed so far in most.

Their biggest challenge will surely lie in the Supreme Court. The Colorado judges suspended their ruling until the top court has its say – and Mr Trump’s lawyers lost no time in stressing their intention to appeal to the Washington bench.

“It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order,” Trump’s legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said.

Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are conservative, and three of them were appointed by Trump himself.

He will reprise his argument in Colorado, that his provocative remarks on January 6 were constitutionally protected as free speech, and that the deadly riot was not that big a deal, failing to qualify as a full-blown insurrection.

In particular, his lawyers insist, the constitutional clause barring Civil War insurrectionists from standing for elections does not apply to the office of president. That argument was upheld by a lower court judge in Colorado.

Weighted with its right-wing majority, the federal Supreme Court has long been demolishing arguments dear to the Democrats, most notably by abolishing the federal protection guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion.

The Supreme Court is also being asked to intervene on the question of whether Trump enjoyed presidential immunity absolving him of any crimes on January 6. Victory in that argument would go a long way to clearing him in federal and state trials linked to the Capitol Hill violence.

But opponents say that any grant of immunity would turn the president into a monarch who is above the law – undermining the very reasons that Americans fought for independence from Britain.

“Once again the Supreme Court is being thrust into the centre of a US presidential election,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the New York Times.

He cited the court’s momentous ruling that handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush over his Democratic rival Al Gore.

“But, unlike in 2000, the general political instability in the United States makes the situation now much more precarious,” Professor Hasen stressed.

Trump himself did not mention the Colorado ruling at a campaign event in Iowa on Tuesday night – but did repeat the kind of inflammatory language that has moderates so worried about his potential return to the White House.

Referring to immigrants, he said: “It’s crazy what’s going on. They’re ruining our country. And it’s true, they’re destroying the blood of our country.”

His reference to the nation’s “blood” has drawn criticism from the Biden campaign that he is echoing Adolf Hitler. Trump retorted: “They don’t like it when I said that. And I’ve never read Mein Kampf.”