Michigan Supreme Court Rejected Appeal to Remove Trump From Ballot

John Minchillo/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Donald Trump will remain on Michigan’s ballot for the 2024 presidential election. On Wednesday, Michigan’s Supreme Court rejected the latest appeal to strike the indicted former president from the state’s GOP primary ticket. The state’s top court ruled that the secretary of state has no authority to remove a candidate from the rolls under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from office. This decision upholds a lower court’s ruling from November.
This is a win for the four-times indicted ex-president, who earlier this month was successfully disqualified from Colorado’s ballot—a ruling that reportedly he is expected to appeal in the US Supreme Court. Predictably, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to celebrate, calling the attempted removal a “pathetic gambit to rig” the 2024 presidential election. 
Currently, Trump’s presidential eligibility is being questioned in at least 16 states, according to the New York Times, with his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection as the basis for most of these cases. The 14th Amendment was ratified after the Civil War in 1868, and Section 3 states that no elected official, from Congress to the presidency, “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” As Mother Jones’s Madison Pauly reported, “If the [Supreme Court] justices were to affirm the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, Trump could be wiped off ballots nationwide.”