If this was a "normally" functioning polity (or maybe even a nominally functioning polity) the ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court might be welcomed news ... but this isn't a normally functioning democracy. If it was, the ruling wouldn't have happened at all because Trump's candidacy wouldn't even be a thing. But Trump's candidacy is a thing. It's not the same thing it was in 2016 or 2020, though. He's leading in the polls, mostly on the strength of his incredibly zealous followers and the weakness of his flaccid competition. That said, he's no sure thing. His rallies are not being aired live on every infotainment channel. He's hobbled by incredibly high negative ratings. And he's saying increasingly outlandish things in an attempt to force himself into the newscycle because attention + outrage = the oxygen that feeds him.
That's why the move to bump him from the ballot is at best misguided and at worst suicidal. Instead of dealing Trump a blow, the Colorado Supreme Court garnished Trump's martyrdom with a glittering halo. It's a strategic blunder reminiscent of the first impeachment, when his approval ratings had cratered and his relevance was waning. The first impeachment recharged him and validated him and reinvigorated his devotees at a time when the oxygen was leaving his tent.
Like that tactically-satisfying, but strategically-stupid move, this ruling is an unintended confirmation of the biases that put him in the White House in the first place. And it's a wedge he can use to pry loose independents who may be tired of his shtick, but who may also offended that a cadre of self-righteous "liberal elites" refuse to risk letting them decide for themselves who they want to vote for in the next election. And this ruling is a much-welcomed infusion of media oxygen for an attention vampire who can only be defeated by repeatedly driving the stake of losing through his narcissistic heart. Instead, the ruling offers a path to renewed relevance for his argument that he's being unfairly persecuted. It's that persecution complex that binds him to the electorate and it'll be the reason he wins if he retakes the White House next November.
You write: "...the Colorado Supreme Court [ruling] might be welcomed news ... but this isn't a normally functioning democracy. If it was, the ruling wouldn't have happened at all because Trump's candidacy wouldn't even be a thing. "
You are so right! And this is huge! The fact that Trump is walking around free right now after his criminal negligence during the first 2 months of the pandemic and after his inciting and then failing to quell an insurrection, makes me feel like we are actually stuck in a zombie movie, or an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or a new episode of Black Mirror. But even before he committed these world-class crimes of treason, the fact that almost half of American voters chose to hand him the codes to our nuclear arsenal was even MORE surreal! In 2020, 57% of white men and 55% of white women voters chose Trump. That's enough to drive any sane American to drink. We have to live with these people, and we are watching them in real time having a huge detrimental effect on our children's lives and basically guaranteeing them a hideous future!
If a police captain's own body cam showed him eating a donut while enjoying witnessing a woman being raped right outside of his squad car, and even rolling down his window a few times and calling out encouragement to the rapist, that officer would end up in prison within a week. And yet we watched with our own eyes while Trump, the Commander in Chief of our military, committed a similar crime for 3 hours during the insurrection! His job was to quell the insurrection, and failing to do so was criminal negligence, reckless endangerment, and treason, plain and simple. Because he was the leader of the military, he should have been sentenced to stand before a firing squad within a week for this crime, since the evidence was televised in real time and there was no question about his guilt.
The J6 commission spent many days proving that the J6 riot WAS an insurrection. For example, Trump knew he'd lost the election by millions of votes and lost the Electoral College substantially as well, and he knew that most of his 50 lawsuits claiming election fraud had been thrown out of court. The Secret Service was genuinely afraid for Mike Pence's life. Our representatives in Congress such as AOC were 1 pane of glass and perhaps 1 minute away from possible death, and they will have to deal with that trauma for life. 140 Capitol police officers were injured and many of them hospitalized. And our Constitution, which everybody in our Congress has sworn to protect, says clearly that an insurrectionist can't run for President.
I don't see, however, how you can say that the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling was "stupid". It's a regular ruling upholding a regular law, a law that Trump clearly broke. For the first time in American history a losing candidate impeded the smooth transfer of power, a wonderful and really quite amazing feature of our country. (Check out how it goes in African countries!)
Trump has f*cked everything up, and Biden is basically a war criminal for assisting Cheney/Bush in creating the 2003 Iraq invasion when he was a powerful senator and head of the Foreign Relations Committee, but you don't want to throw out all the laws, right? For example, if YOU were defrauded by a solar panel company today, who sold you defective panels and damaged your home, you'd want to be able to hold them legally responsible, right?
The part we need to focus on, as you say, is the "flaccid competition" facing Trump. An alien sociologist studying Earth's humans would consider Biden criminally insane for spinning the big chamber of a nuclear revolver in a game of Russian roulette in Ukraine EVERY DAY FOR TWO YEARS ... at a Cuban Missile Crises level of horrible odds! Let's think about what Biden and our ghouls in the Pentagon who play chess with human bodies thought made this gamble "worth it": laundering $50 billion of American workers' tax dollars into the pockets of military contractors and pouring 200,000 human lives into a CRACK running across Ukraine that hasn't moved in a year. All for the "good" of recreating WW1 trench warfare but with modern weapons. How in the hell was that worth risking the life of every child in the world every day for 2 years?!
Don't you check the notifications on your iPhone every morning right when you wake up to see if the "end of the world" has started yet? I sure do.
Those who have failed to study the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the other hand, don't worry much about it. They should. It's a fact that we escaped a holocaust that would have killed, according to Dan Ellsberg, America's preeminent expert on nuclear weapons, BILLIONS of people and most likely destroyed human civilization, not by a coin toss, but more like by winning a trifecta! If you haven't already read "Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Dan Ellsberg (RIP), please do!
To the alien sociologist, regardless of whether we elect Trump or Biden to the presidency, we will be seen as a completely dysfunctional, literally insane country that was, as a whole, masochistic! Just think about that. A whole country unwittingly acting out a death wish, and a hideous, terrifying, slow death at that, by civil war or nuclear holocaust or both.
Isn't it weird that the only thing all the countries in the world are cooperating on is omnicide?
Is there any hope Americans will somehow wake up in time? 2024 might be the last year of "normalcy" we Americans ever experience. WW3 has already started for many, for example, the 6 million killed in the Congo starting in the late 1990s, with warfare still in progress, which our media ignores as long as we keep getting a steady stream of cobalt from them for the batteries of our phones, computers, and EVs. WW3 has already started for the 4.5 million people* whose deaths have been caused by the U.S. military just since 9/11, along with causing 38 million people to become refugees -- their only crime was living on top of oil that the White Empire wanted to control.
* recent Brown University Study http://www.zenhell.com/temp/Brown_University_study_Costs_of_War_2023.jpg