Don’t sweat today’s court ruling that Donald Trump will remain on the ballot

For the past year a whole lot of people on TV and Twitter, including a number of legal pundits who knew better, have been insisting that Donald Trump was going to be removed from the 2024 ballot and that it would magically swing the election.

For the past year I’ve been pointing out that the only states considering removing Trump were states where he’d have gotten zero electoral votes to begin with, and that the courts were never going to let it stand anyway, and so this effort was going to have no impact. The very best case scenario was that Trump might have lost one electoral vote in Maine, which splits its electoral votes and looking at removing Trump.

Is one electoral vote worth chasing? Absolutely. But again, the courts were never going to let this stand. The courts simply do not interpret the 14th Amendment in the way that some of us wish they would. We’ve seen this with previous cases, such as the effort to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from the ballot. If the Supreme Court were to rule that Trump could be removed from the ballot, it would have been overturning lower court precedent. Much as I’d like to have been wrong, it was just never going to happen.

Sure enough, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that states can’t remove Donald Trump from the ballot. This was always going to happen. As I said all along, this whole “Trump is magically disqualified” narrative was nothing more than a waste of a year. And now that it’s played out in exactly the way it was always going to play out, it’s leading to quite a bit of doomsday hysteria. If folks were on edge before, they’re really on edge now that one of the most popular magic wand ideas has officially been put out of its misery.

But that’s the thing about simplistic, unrealistic magic wand ideas. As these narratives sweep across social media, opportunistically popularized by people who know better and then naively latched onto by people who don’t know better, it always ends up getting framed in terms of “This magic wand thing will absolutely happen or else we’re doomed.” Yet in reality, not only is that magic wand thing never going to happen, we’re very much not doomed.

Back in the real world, Donald Trump is now just three weeks away from the start of his criminal trial in New York on thirty-four felony charges. At least one of his other criminal trials will also likely take place this year. President Biden’s numbers are trending in the right direction. Democrats keep overperforming in elections. Trump keeps underperforming his poll numbers. And he’s suffering from dementia that’s literally worsening by the day.

Once you accept that this “Trump is magically disqualified” thing was never a real thing, and you look at what’s actually going on, you realize we’re in pretty darn good shape. You really have to like the odds that Biden wins the 2024 election and Trump ends up rotting somewhere.

Are the odds 100%? Of course not. The real world doesn’t work that way. The uncertainty can be unnerving. That’s why the simplistic magic wand ideas that become popular on social media can be so comforting. They always claim to have a 100% chance of magically solving all of our problems, with the added bonus that we don’t have to put in any work in order to succeed. But none of that kind of stuff is ever real.

In the real world, the odds of success are always less than 100%. And in the real world, those odds are always at least partially dependent on your willingness to put in the work required to succeed. There was always going to be a 2024 election, the Republicans were always going to have a nominee, that nominee was always going to be awful, and the election was always going to be a street fight. Can you remember a presidential election that wasn’t?

Even if Trump’s criminal convictions or senility end up costing him the nomination at the Republican National Convention, the Republicans are still going to nominate someone. Even in the fantasyland scenario where Trump had been removed from the ballot, the Republicans still would have just nominated someone else. Would you feel better about this election if the Republicans were running with a Plan B candidate like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis? Are these options more appealing to you? They shouldn’t be.

So let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that this “Trump is going to be magically removed from the ballot” thing was never a real thing. Today’s ruling isn’t a setback for our side. Of course if you allowed certain Twitter pundits to bait you into wasting a year expecting this fantasy to succeed, then it might feel like a loss. But that’s why it’s so important not to get sucked in by simplistic magic wand scenarios to begin with. They may be equal parts invigorating and comforting, but they’re never real. And when that bubble bursts, you end up feeling hopeless for no reason.