David Pratt: Donald Trump's Colorado boost and Joe Biden's Gaza crisis

In Trump’s case, it’s Colorado. That pesky ruling by the state’s top court that he can’t run in the primary election under the US constitution’s insurrection clause.

With Biden, it’s Gaza. The tricky diplomatic dilemma on how to reconcile the problem of managing relations with Israel while healing deep internal divisions at home over the issue within his own political base.

But let’s take Trump first. It was last Tuesday that the Colorado court ruled that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution bars him from seeking office because he engaged in an insurrection after the 2020 election. This culminated in the January 6, 2021 assault on the US capitol by a group of his supporters.

The seven-member Colorado court voted 4-3 that Trump should be disqualified. The majority found that evidence presented to it “established that President Trump engaged in insurrection”.

“President Trump’s direct and express efforts over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterised as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary,” the Colorado court added.

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By last Friday, Trump’s woes were only compounded when the US Supreme Court declined, for now, to decide whether he has immunity from prosecution for his alleged role in that insurrection.

On the face of it, both the Colorado and Supreme Court rulings appeared to be a serious blow to Trump’s ambitions to win back the White House in 2024. While rival Democrats and Republican opponents of Trump publicly welcomed the new pressures on the former president, many privately worry that it will hand the Republican frontrunner even more firepower in his quest to win the party’s nomination. In short, far from them being a hindrance, they could be the best thing yet that’s happened to Trump’s re-election campaign.

“When the picture is painted that a liberal judge or a liberal prosecutor puts their thumb on the scales of justice, it offends the sensibility of the folks in the middle,” Chip Saltsman, the campaign chair for former presidential candidate Mike Pence, told the Financial Times. “It’s jet fuel for the base.”

Already, that “jet fuel” is having an impact – with signs of it propelling Trump even further up the polls. Election watchers point to the fact that the same thing happened earlier this year when Trump was indicted on a litany of felony charges.

Back then, just like now, Trump was quick to make his argument that he’s the victim of a partisan legal process while all the time his campaign coffers fill up.

According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump is slightly ahead of Biden in the White House race though some Democrats argue that the Colorado ruling could help them appeal to crucial independent voters who believe Trump engaged in insurrection.

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted December 5-11, 57% of independent voters said it was believable that Trump “tried to incite a mob to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021”. Only 30% said it was unbelievable.

By contrast, some 70% of Republican respondents considered that allegation “not believable,” while 23% of Republicans said it was believable and the rest were not sure.

Asked last Wednesday if Trump is an insurrectionist, Biden said it was “self-evident. You saw it all”.

“Whether the 14th Amendment applies or not, we’ll let the court make that decision,” Biden said. “But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero. And he seems to be doubling down on it.”

On the very same day that Biden doubled down on his own condemnation of Trump’s alleged role in the -insurrection, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) took a different view, highlighting what the newspaper described as “The Folly of Colorado’s Trump Disqualification”.

“The decision by four Colorado judges to bar Donald Trump from the state presidential ballot is an ugly turn that augurs nothing but trouble for American law and democracy,” The WSJ warned.

“Even if the US Supreme Court overturns the ruling, as it probably will, the Colorado decision will confirm for millions of Americans that Mr Trump’s opponents will do everything possible to deny them their democratic choice,” the editorial added.

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In what was a searing rebuke of the Colorado decision, the newspaper went on to say that it showed how Democrats are determined to make 2024 an election decided by lawyers and courts, not by voters.

“[Democrats] seem to believe this is the way finally to banish Donald Trump from politics, but have they been paying attention?” the newspaper went on to ask.

Many agree, arguing that Trump will fight defeat by any means in November’s ballot and that ridding him from the American political scene should require convincing sufficient voters and not just a handful of judges.

Significant too is the fact that after the Colorado decision, even some of Trump’s Republican opponents in the contest for the GOP nomination rallied to his defence.

While Nikki Haley (above), the former US ambassador to the UN under Trump, told reporters at her own campaign stop in Agency, Iowa, that she intended to beat Trump “fair and square,” without judges “making these decisions”, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, accused Democrats of “abusing their power”.

With courts in a handful of other states having so far rejected the ruling that barred Trump through the 14th Amendment, this once again places the Supreme Court in the epicentre of yet another frantic political fight.

In the unlikely event a number of states also strike Trump from the ballot, making it impossible for him to win the nomination, Biden would not necessarily stand to gain. Some polls have shown both Haley and DeSantis would run a competitive race against the 81-year-old incumbent.

In the wake of the Colorado ruling, Hassan Martini, executive director of No Democrat Left Behind, an -advocacy group that seeks to win over rural voters, told Reuters news agency, that while Trump would try to use the ruling to his advantage, Biden must stay focused on strengths including economic progress, bipartisan outreach and steady leadership.

“Getting caught in the trap of endless Trump controversies would only benefit his opponents,” Martini said.

But even without the distraction of such controversies, Biden has his own political millstone right now as the election campaign gears up in the new year. For if Trump appears to be turning the Colorado ruling to his campaign advantage, the same cannot be said of Biden over the crisis in Gaza and relations with Israel.

Last Monday, Biden’s dilemma was laid bare when a group of prominent House Democrats with national security backgrounds sent a letter to the President arguing that the military strategy of the government of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (below) is not in the best interests of the US nor Israel’s own security.

“We are deeply concerned by PM Netanyahu’s current military strategy in Gaza. The mounting civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis are unacceptable and not in line with American interests; nor do they advance the cause of security for our ally Israel,” the letter says. “We also believe it jeopardises efforts to -destroy the terrorist organisation Hamas and secure the release of all hostages.”

Signed by six politicians, including former serving military personnel and CIA analysts, it summed up the -political tightrope Biden is having to walk right now. Simultaneously, he has to not only try and keep the often difficult Netanyahu close, but also weave his way through the deep internal divisions in his own political base.

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On top of this, he must also assuage the criticism of those who say American foreign policy is making the world a more unstable and dangerous place. All this throws up challenges to Biden’s response to a crisis that has been dictated by Washington’s loyalty to a decades-old alliance with Israel.

Only days of intense negotiations enabled Biden’s administration on Friday to avoid casting a veto at the United Nations Security Council in defence of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. But the US abstention from a resolution designed to help more humanitarian aid reach Gaza only served to focus yet more attention on America’s damaged standing around the world as it becomes an increasingly lonely protector of Israel.

But if accommodating Netanyahu is one thing playing on Biden’s mind, it’s the take of US voters that likely most concerns him. In all, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, voters broadly disapprove of the way President Biden is handling this latest chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Younger Americans especially are far more critical than older voters of both Israel’s conduct and the US administration’s response to the war in Gaza. In a sample poll, 75% of young voters aged between 18 and 29 disapprove of how the Democrat is handling the conflict. It also found that 27% of young people -sympathise with Israel while 47% sympathise with Palestinians.

But arguably the most serious cases of dissent for Biden have come from within the White House itself, where more than 40 interns who work there and other branches of the executive office called for Biden to support a ceasefire in Gaza, accusing him of having ignored the “pleas of the American people” by not calling for an end to the war. Other groups of staffers at the White House, the State Department, and other agencies have also expressed their opposition.

Josh Paul, a former civil servant in the political-military affairs bureau at State, resigned in protest in October and speaking recently to the Financial Times (FT) said there remains strong disagreement inside the government over Biden’s handling of the conflict.

“There are people who think that what we’re doing is a moral disaster; that we shouldn’t be facilitating the deaths of so many innocent civilians – and this runs directly [against] the values that the Biden administration claimed as it came into office,” says Paul, who added that others worry the approach is doing “vast damage” to the country’s relationships and reputation in the Middle East.

While Biden wrestles with the Gaza-Israel dilemma, Trump has remained quiet on the crisis even if, as a number of observers have pointed out, his past form would suggest the former president is likely to be unequivocal in his support for Israel.

This means that if the conflict remains unresolved by the time of the US election, young voters are likely to flock to the Republican candidate, working on the assumption of course that Trump is nominated.

For the moment though, this will be little consolation to the Biden campaign team, who see their man juggling a near impossible set of foreign policy and election objectives.

Speaking last week to Newsweek magazine, Thomas Gift, associate professor of political science in the School of Public Policy at University College London, laid bare the reality of the dilemma Biden faces.

“President Biden is in a no-win situation on Israel. He’s hearing it from all sides – from pro-Israel groups who expect the White House to give Prime Minister Netanyahu its full-throated support, as well as from pro-Palestinian groups who think the IDF’s (Israel Defence Force) retaliation has been disproportionate and not sufficiently targeted.”

And so as the heated debate on whether Trump engaged in an insurrection goes on, the signs are that instead of damaging his re-election chances they are in fact bolstering them. This, alongside Biden’s Gaza dilemma, will be something the Republicans will make much of in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, for his part, Biden will continue to undergo the challenge that just about every US president at some point has experienced over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Last week, Brian Katulis, senior fellow and vice-president of policy at the Middle East Institute, wryly described this in the FT as Biden’s “Michael Corleone moment in the Middle East”.

It’s a reference, of course, to that memorable scene in The Godfather III when the mafia boss complains of getting pulled back into a life of crime. Whether Joe Biden can extricate himself from this political mire remains to be seen. For now, the situation in Gaza is impacting negatively on his re-election chances at precisely the moment when, against the grain, Colorado is giving Trump a boost he could never have anticipated.