Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Donald Trump has sued to reinstate his name to Maine’s presidential primary ballot, after its secretary of state said the former president was disqualified from holding higher office because of his role in the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
Trump on Tuesday asked a court in Maine to reverse the decision by Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, saying she was a “biased decision maker” who should have recused herself. Bellows, who was appointed by the state legislature, previously ran for the US Senate as a Democrat.
Trump’s appeal in Maine came less than a week after Bellows found he was not qualified to be president under the 14th amendment of the US constitution, which prohibits individuals who have engaged in insurrection from holding office.
Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 US presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, and argued that the contest had been “rigged” against him. On January 6, he encouraged mobs of his supporters who descended on the national mall and later marched to the US Capitol, where they stormed the legislature and tried to interrupt the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Bellows said in her decision that Trump “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters” and “was aware of the likelihood for violence and at least initially supported its use”.
Maine became the second state where Trump was disqualified from seeking the presidency under the 14th amendment, after the Colorado state supreme court ruled last month that he was not fit to hold office.
Trump is expected to file a separate appeal to the US Supreme Court and ask the nation’s highest court to overturn the Colorado decision.
That will pile pressure on the Supreme Court, which counts three Trump-appointed justices on its nine-judge panel, to issue a decisive ruling on whether the former president can be disqualified from seeking another four years in the White House.
With fewer than two weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, the official start of the Republican presidential nominating process, Trump remains the undisputed frontrunner in a shrinking field of rivals vying to take on Biden at the ballot box in November.
His poll numbers have gone up as his legal woes have mounted, including 91 criminal charges across four separate cases. One case in Washington federal court relates to his actions on January 6 2021 and alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has pleaded not guilty.
Trump commands the support of half of Iowa Republicans, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight average of opinion polls, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis trailing in a distant second place, on 18.4 per cent, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley on 15.7 per cent.
DeSantis and Haley, along with other Republican presidential hopefuls Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, have all attacked the rulings in Maine and Colorado, saying voters, not courts, should decide the party’s nominee for the White House.