The decks have been cleared for the presumptive Republican Party candidate for the US presidency, Mr Donald Trump, to keep his name on ballot papers for the November election. The only thing standing between the former President’s charge towards his old White House job is the incumbent Joe Biden, though another major legal battle is brewing over whether Mr Trump can be prosecuted criminally for interfering in the 2020 election.
The Supreme Court decision on a divisive legal battle to disqualify Mr Trump from running for office after he was thought to have engaged in insurrection, or incited it, in what was the worst anti-democratic rebellion in the United States since the Civil War on January 6, 2021, clears up a few things and yet leaves a few things opaque about the election for President.
The decision of top US court, heavily weighted in favour of Mr Trump with its majority of Conservative judges, has significant implications for the 2024 US election which the world awaits with bated breath as who wins it will have massive implications for the free world as well as a few powerful countries in the authoritarian corner on the other side of a major divide.
Mr Trump’s name was on the ballot paper in the Super Tuesday primary in Colorado, as well as on papers in several other states that were awaiting the legal outcome, after bans on a maverick President who upended many of the tenets of a traditional code of conduct of the avowedly most powerful man in the world.
If the top court is also of similar thinking in the case about possible criminal prosecution of a President who tried to interfere in the election process by influencing officials, then Mr Trump will be the Republican candidate in the presidential polls and the US voters will have to decide who wins. A distinction is being made about those who act and those who tell them to act against the law.
The only consolation is, regardless of what the then incumbent thought of the election process, the US presidency did stand the test of democracy, but thanks mainly to the judiciary shooing Mr Trump away from the White House when he was the whinging sore loser in the 2020 polls and trying to obstruct Mr Biden from taking over the reins.
