If ever there was a word with bursting baggage in the Trump era, it is “insurrection.” In the wake of the Capitol riot, the House — overwhelmingly Democrats but a few Republicans, too — impeached the president, formally accusing him of “incitement of insurrection.” For Democrats, it connoted insufficient umbrage to label a four-hour uprising a mere “riot.” Trump supporters, they maintained, were “insurrectionists” of the neo-Nazi variety. Although no one was actually charged with insurrection (a federal crime since the Civil War era), Democratic-appointed judges echoed this purple prose while presiding over prosecutions of rioters. The Democratic judge presiding over the Democratic Manhattan district attorney’s criminal “hush money” prosecution against Trump also gratuitously invoked it.
Moreover, when it appeared that Trump not only would capture the Republicans’ 2024 presidential nomination but stood a good chance of winning that November, Democratic state attorneys general and the Democratic-dominated Colorado Supreme Court tried to get Trump removed from the ballot, claiming he was ineligible under the 14th Amendment’s ban against insurrectionists.
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