Trump asks Supreme Court to allow him to run for U.S. President

Donald Trump's lawyers have urged judges to overturn the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to exclude the politician from the ballot. They presented their legal arguments in a 59-page legal brief.

"The Court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots," the document says.

Many of these arguments echo the messages Trump presented in lower courts and previously previewed in Supreme Court filings.

The politician denied that the events at the Capitol were a rebellion and also denied that his actions leading up to that day had anything to do with the disturbance.

"Nothing that President Trump did in response to the 2020 election or on January 6, 2021, even remotely qualifies as ‘insurrection.' President Trump never participated in or directed any of the illegal conduct that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In fact, the opposite is true, as President Trump repeatedly called for peace, patriotism, and law and order," the lawyers' statement says.

The politician's lawyers stated that Trump's speech at the Ellipse that day was a political speech protected by the First Amendment, not an attempt to incite his supporters to storm the Capitol.

"Claims that President Trump has powers of telepathy” and knew how his supporters would react don’t hold up," his lawyers wrote.

Against the backdrop of his fiery rhetoric in that speech, Trump repeatedly urged his supporters to fight like hell. At one point, he also called on them to go to the Capitol peacefully.

The critics of the former president, as well as some of his own White House aides, argue that he knew that some in the crowd were armed, and even after the start of the riot, he repeatedly resisted pleas from those around him to calm and disperse the crowd.

Special Counsel Jack Smith's criminal charges against Trump include the assertion that he relied on an aggressive crowd to impede Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory that day. Smith claims it was the culmination of numerous conspiracies aimed at thwarting the transfer of power.

U.S. elections and issues with Trump's candidacy

The upcoming presidential elections in the United States are scheduled for November 5, 2024.

According to forecasts, the leading candidate for the Democrats could be the incumbent American leader, Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has a fair chance of becoming the Republican candidate.

On December 28, Trump's name was removed from the ballot in the primaries in the state of Maine. The head of the state's election commission, Shenna Bellows, noted that the decision was based on the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It prohibits participation in elections for organizers and participants of insurrections, a charge recognized by the court in connection with the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

On December 20, the Colorado Supreme Court also prohibited Trump from participating in the primaries in the state due to the 14th Amendment.

Trump's team has filed an appeal to this decision with the U.S. Supreme Court. Judges have already begun consideration, and a decision is expected on February 8, likely to be applied nationwide.