The ineligible president
The date January 20, 2025, will not represent a “peaceful transition of power.” It will be the day that the legitimately vested government of the United States will voluntarily surrender the presidency to a Constitutionally illegitimate enemy. This isn’t just my opinion, it’s a matter of incontestable fact. The Constitution of the United States says unequivocally that Donald Trump is not eligible to be president. It says so explicitly in Article 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Article 3 of the 14th amendment says as follows: “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 thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Donald Trump, who has taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States,” has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same,” AND “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Trump’s insurrection began by spreading lies about the 2020 election. He provoked and encouraged a mass insurrection against the Capitol resulting in loss of life and damage to government property. He did it because he lacked the maturity and rationality to face the fact that he lost the election.
Rather than use the power vested in his office to execute the sacred promise enshrined in his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Trump sat in a room in the west wing and watched the attack on TV. When he was told that the rioters wanted to hang his Vice President he agreed with that sentiment. Trump ignored numerous pleas from his children, dozens of Republican lawmakers and other officials to intervene and stop the insurrection against the Capitol. He later offered aid and comfort to the insurrectionists by referring to them as “martyrs” and “heroes,” and promised to pardon every one of them if he was ever elected to the presidency again.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that Trump needs to be convicted of the crime of insurrection before he can be declared ineligible to hold the office of the presidency. It requires no Supreme Court decision. It requires no indictment, though he already has one of those. It requires no decision by Congress. Indeed, the Congress can remove his ineligibility if they want to by a “vote of two-thirds of each House,” but until or unless such a vote is taken and passed, Trump is ineligible both de facto and de jure from being president. Period.
Trump is just as ineligible to become president as he would be if he were 34 years of age, or if he had been born in Scotland. There’s an irony here. Recall that for years Trump accused Barack Obama of being a Constitutionally ineligible president. Trump promoted the racist conspiracy theory (that came to be known as the “birther movement”) that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. That, of course, is a lie. President Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1961.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Let’s say (hypothetically) that Obama was born in Kenya, as many lying racists insist he was. What would that have meant? It would have meant that he would have been debarred from running for President. Any election elevating him to the presidency would have been illegitimate, and if the discovery had been made while he was President he would have been Constitutionally required to step down.
Now, to be sure, I do not know by what mechanism Obama would have been removed in this absurd hypothetical. But his illegitimacy wouldn’t have been open to debate. If Congress wanted to keep him in despite his automatic disqualification they could have done so with a two-thirds vote in the House and the Senate, which, given the racist sentiment against Obama at the time, would have been laughably unlikely.
Do I think any of this matters as it relates to Trump? No, of course not. Like you, brothers and sisters, I am too acquainted with disappointment to hold out any realistic hope that Trump will be refused the office he is so clearly illegible to fulfil. But it changes nothing. He is still ineligible to be president. And if there is another 2018-style blue wave in 2026, I have little doubt that Trump will be impeached again. And who knows?, the third time may be the charm.
Americans have faced despotism before and we have always defeated it. We defeated Hitler, we defeated the tyranny of slavery and the southern states that supported it, we defeated a British king in a baptism of fire that gave us our name. Some how, some way we will defeat Trump, a man who is Constitutionally excluded from ever holding the office he is about to assume.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.