Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Former President Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, on Dec. 19, 2023.
Colorado's Supreme Court disqualifies Trump from state primary ballot
The Colorado Supreme Court accepted the argument that the 14th Amendment disqualifies former President Donald Trump from running in 2024 after determining that he played a role in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. The game-changing decision — which will inevitably be taken to the Supreme Court — mandates that Colorado’s secretary of state exclude Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot.
The court's decision is the first to find that the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump, and it could set a precedent for other states to pursue similar actions. So far, 14th Amendment cases in states like Michigan and Minnesota have failed to remove Trump’s name from any state ballot.
The ruling is stalled until Jan. 4, 2024, to allow time for Trump to appeal to the US Supreme Court. Trump's campaign promptly vowed to appeal the ruling to the nation's highest court. The primary season also begins in January, and if Trump becomes the nominee, the Supreme Court will need to rule quickly to avoid the unprecedented possibility of statewide disenfranchisement if the Republican presidential candidate is absent from an entire state’s ballot.
If the Supreme Court affirms this ruling, Trump could be disqualified from running in all states, drastically altering the landscape of the 2024 election. Many in the Republican Party will view the decision as an infringement on their right to vote for their candidate of choice while reinforcing their belief that Trump is the victim of a witch hunt. While this is unlikely to hurt Trump’s position as the Republican front-runner, a fierce legal battle lies ahead.
A protester holds a banner that says "Trump indicted."
What makes this Trump case different?
Former President Donald Trump will appear in federal court on Thursday after being indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election result.
(For more on what’s in the indictment, see here.)
Amid a seemingly never-ending loop of Trump legal quandaries, what makes this case different from the former president’s other legal woes?
Many legal scholars have said the other two cases in which Trump has been indicted in recent months – relating to hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign and the mishandling of classified documents – are more minor compared to the severity of the federal counts he’s now facing. Indeed, the federal indictment accuses him of “defrauding the federal government,” and, well, attempting to steal the presidency itself.
What’s more, the documents case (the trial is scheduled for May 2024) will be presided over by a Trump-appointed judge in deep-red Florida who has made legal decisions in the past beneficial to the man who gave her the job.
Conversely, this case will be heard by an Obama-tapped judge who has issued harsh sentences against Jan. 6 rioters and compelled the Trump team to grant Congress access to crucial materials during the course of its probe of the Capitol riots that became the cornerstone of the investigative committee’s findings.
Lawyers in the hush money payment case in New York, meanwhile, will need to prove that Trump falsified business records in order to cover a crime – which many legal scholars say will be hard to do. But in the election case, some of the Jan 6. rioters have already been tried – and found guilty – under the same statutes.
Finally, this is uncharted waters for the US. No president has ever been charged with trying to steal an election, and no prosecutor has ever had to navigate such unknown legal and political territory.
Both sides will try hard to determine what evidence can be used at trial, which, given Trump’s other court cases – and the sensitivity of this case – could still be many months away. Still, all four of the felonies Trump is facing carry potential prison terms of between 5-20 years. So, could he pardon himself if he were to win the 2024 election? There’s no clear-cut answer, experts say, given that no president has ever been hit with criminal charges.
An explosion caused by a police munition while supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol Building.
Trump charged with trying to overturn 2020 election
“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.” So reads Tuesday’s federal indictment of former President Donald Trump.
The first set of charges linked to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe of Trump’s dealings in the weeks and months leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots dropped late Tuesday, and the former president faces four felony counts for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election. These include: conspiracy to violate civil rights, conspiracy to defraud the American government, corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to carry out such obstruction.
Along with these new charges, Trump is now facing three separate criminal cases – the other two concern hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign and mishandling classified documents.
Thus far, he has denied wrongdoing related to the 2020 election. We expect more of the same when he appears in court on Thursday in Washington, DC, to answer the latest charges.
Will even more legal trouble hurt him at the polls? Unlikely. Trump is running neck and neck with President Joe Biden, according to a new Times/Siena poll, and he’s outpacing his nearest Republican rival for the nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 37 points.
As Jon Lieber, managing director of Eurasia Group's US Practice, pointed out when Trump was indicted recently over his alleged mishandling of classified documents, these scandals don’t seem to hurt the former president. “[He] has survived multiple rounds of scandal, legal challenges, and ethical lapses that would've sunk any other politician.” Case in point: If Trump were to run against DeSantis today, he would, according to the Times/Siena poll, get 22% of his votes from those who believe he has committed federal crimes.
Brazil insurrection over, but not the threat to democracy
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take to kick off your week.
And my god, Brazil, January 8th. We've seen something like that before. Yes, we have, if you're the United States. This was a large number, thousands of Brazilians wanting to stop the steal, that fake election that they had in Brazil just a couple months ago that Lula won, won it legitimately. But former President Bolsonaro refused to concede, made his chief of staff do it. And his supporters believe that the election was unfair, was rigged. And they've been in encampments for a couple of months now, thousands of them, and decided over the course of the weekend, a week after the inauguration, to forcibly occupy the headquarters, the most important buildings for the legislature, the Congressional palace, the executive, the Presidential palace, and the Supreme Court. And as a consequence, you saw all this damage, this vandalism being done, furniture being destroyed, windows being broken, art being stolen, you name it. And it's just an incredible shame, day of sadness for Brazil.
A few things that we should talk about. The first is that Bolsonaro has said nothing over the course of these last couple of weeks. He has certainly been promoting the idea that the election was stolen from him, but he's been in Florida. He was with Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago bringing in the New Year, and since then has been in Orlando where he rented a house. And most recently after the protestors came in and formed this insurrection, he basically said that he condemned the violence. And that's a smart thing for him to do because everyone in Brazil is condemning this right now. All the political parties and the court and the military leaders, some 1,200 have already been arrested that participated in the break-ins.
Also, there's going to be a major investigation specifically into who funded. This was well organized, it was financed. There were buses that brought the people in to Brasilia. Where did that money come from? There's a lot of speculation given some of the advising that Trump, MAGA types have been providing to Bolsonaro, his son, Eduardo, and others, people like Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist of Trump, that some of the money came from the United States. That's speculation. There's no proof, there's no evidence at this point, but there will be a serious investigation. And when that comes out, that will clearly lead to knock-on effects, both for relations with the United States as well as the impact of politicization and polarization inside Brazil itself. Keep in mind that if it is found that there are such fingerprints on these demonstrations, the far-right wing in Brazil will call it fake news and disinformation. And for them, it will be yet another argument, a conspiracy theory that the establishment is against them no matter what.
There's not much impact on Brazil in the near-term, in the sense that all of the protestors have been cleared out. Lula is president and there was an easy and peaceful transfer of power to his administration just as there ultimately was in the United States in 2021. That's not going to change, but long-term, this is an agitated, radical, and potentially violent, serious number of people in Brazil that are willing to break things. They're angry and they're willing to break things. And as Lula's popularity, which is in the high fifties now, which is pretty good, but low for a honeymoon in Brazil, slips, both because he's been there for a while and also because Brazil's economy is under a lot of pressure, the potential for this to become a much more serious threat to Brazilian democracy over time is very real indeed.
One final point that I would make, and that is that this is an American export. We mentioned in our Top Risks back a week ago, risk number three, weapons of mass disruption, where we said that the United States, which had been the leading exporter of democracy in the world back when the wall came down in '89, frequently hypocritically, frequently without success, but nonetheless, in 2022-23, the US has become the leading exporter of tools that destroy democracy, and that is very much the case with what we're seeing in Brazil right now. Social media algorithms leading to political polarization and leading to an export of these tools into other countries that are more brittle, whose democratic institutions haven't been around for as long, whose institutions are not as legitimized and aren't as entrenched, and has the potential to break those democracies.
Horrible to see that coming from the United States, not the intention of what these social media companies and these technology billionaires are trying to do, but it is certainly an indirect effect that comes from the business model, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
That's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon.