Donald Trump and Accountability
Elections & Politics Policy Brief #92 | By: Abigail Hunt | September 5, 2023
Photo taken from: nsjonline.com
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Donald Trump is currently the leading candidate for the Republican party Presidential nomination – this man who openly bragged, on tape, about sexually assaulting strangers is somehow the person that many rural and misinformed Americans believe is their savior. Trump, who faces 91 criminal counts against him in New York, Georgia, and on the federal level. Trump’s indictments are mounting like the unpaid debts he accumulates. Indicted first in New York in spring 2023, Trump was hit with 34 counts of falsifying business records regarding his involvement in a $130,000 payment – of alleged hush money – to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress. On the federal level, prosecutors indicted Trump in June for 40 charges of “willful retention of national defense information” regarding classified documents he took from the White House and stored in his shower in Mar-A-Lago, among other places.
On August 24th, Trump’s booking in Fulton County, Georgia where he faces 13 charges including fraud and racketeering was the first one of his his recent arrests to produce a mugshot. And what a mugshot. Trump leers into the camera like a movie villain. He and 18 other defendants face charges of attempting to manipulate the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. Should a vocal and proud traitor to the federal government be allowed to run for the office of the President? Trump thinks so, but others are not so sure.
In late August, two Constitutional scholars, a retired federal U.S. Court of appeals judge and a nationally recognized professor of constitutional law from Harvard, argued in an article in The Atlantic that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, includes language that precludes Donald J. Trump from ever being President again.
Section 3 states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies there of. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
One Florida lawyer agreed so strongly with the Constitutional argument that he filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court. Lawrence Caplan of Ft. Lauderdale, FL put forth the argument that Trump was ineligible to run again for President due to his part in the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the Capitol. Caplan requested the court bar Trump from running for President and from taking part in the 2024 Florida Republican primary.
Despite the article’s persuasive arguments and his own track record of abusive, illegal, and treasonous behavior, Trump persists in being successful among conservatives. Even when his own former cabinet members have turned on him, many of Trump’s supporters remain steadfast. After his mugshot was released, Trump himself shared it on “X” (formerly known as Twitter) with the title, “Mug Shot – August 24, 2023” and the caption, “ELECTION INTERFERENCE! NEVER SURRENDER! DONALDJTRUMP.COM.” If there is one thing you can say about Trump, it is that he never fails to make headlines. But how long can he avoid accountability for his actions? The coming year will tell us a lot.