Democrats are privately upset with the Colorado Supreme Court because they believe the ruling that bars Donald Trump from the Colorado ballot will ultimately help the former president.
The message of President Joe Biden’s campaign is clear: Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. But officials in the Biden administration and Biden campaign fear the Colorado Supreme Court has undercut that narrative.
NBC News, citing sources, reported that officials in both the White House and Biden campaign are “pissed” with the Colorado Supreme Court because the ruling makes it look “like Colorado is attempting election interference through non-elected Democratic-appointed justices with funding from ‘shady left-wing donors.'”
In fact, Democratic officials are so worried about the political ramifications of the ruling that they hope Supreme Court justices unanimously rule in Trump’s favor if and when they hear an appeal of the Colorado decision.
“We all hope Biden wakes up on Christmas morning to an A3 story in the Delaware News Journal saying that the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of Trump,” a Democratic source told NBC News.
That another legal judgment against Trump would help his campaign is not a surprise. After all, Trump’s polling only went up after his criminal indictments, and he now leads Biden in most polls.
Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis told NBC News the Colorado decision “feeds the Trump persecution complex.” But it does more than that. For the average American, the decision proves it.
Not only are three different prosecutors hoping to bring Trump to trial in the middle of the 2024 campaign, but now four non-elected, Democrat-appointed justices have removed Trump from one state’s ballot. It’s a bad look for Biden and Democrats, who are on the side that claims to be the defenders of American democracy, especially when they decried election security laws in Georgia as Jim Crow 2.0.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr summarized the political impact that Colorado’s decision will have on voters.
“This kind of action of stretching the law, taking these hyper-aggressive positions to try to knock Trump out of the race, are counterproductive. They backfire,” he said on CNN. “He feeds on grievance just like a fire feeds on oxygen. This is going to end up as a grievance that helps him.”
