“This is how dictatorships are born.” Such was Donald Trump’s response to news that the Colorado supreme court had ruled that the former president is disqualified from holding office and so should be removed from the state’s Republican primary ballot.

Anytime Trump speaks of “dictatorships” these days we should pay attention. He has all but declared his intention to engage in dictatorial rule should he win in 2024. It isn’t clear, then, whether his statement, in a fund-raising missive fired off minutes after the news broke, was meant as a condemnation of the ruling or a prediction of how he would handle such legal setbacks should he be returned to the White House.

The spectator of a dictatorial Trump using the presidency to deform the rule of law into a tool of political punishment explains why millions of Americans continue to cling to the hope that our court system will spare us an electoral reckoning with Trump. Biden continues to suffer from inexplicably weak polling numbers while Trump has managed to turn criminal counts into a fund-raising juggernaut. None of this translates into Trump’s defeating Biden in the national popular vote in 2024. But, as we all know, he doesn’t have to. Our grossly defective Electoral College could once again hand Trump the presidency.

And so the hope that........

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