Ballot removal successes have Trump finally 'interested in democracy': columnist

While it's not known if the recent booting of Donald Trump from the Colorado and Maine state ballots will survive a U.S. Supreme Court review, Trump's claims that the rulings violate the spirit of democracy are rich, considering that he started his political career trying to unjustly keep his political opponents off the ballot, David Frum writes in The Atlantic.

"Trump himself launched his presidential career by arguing that President Barack Obama should not have been able to run for president because Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the United States," Frum writes, later adding that Trump "tried to disqualify voters who’d exercised their right to vote by mail or whose ballots had for any reason not yet been counted by midnight on Election Day" back in 2020.

Also read: Trump's latest ballot-ban rebuttal demolished by Watergate prosecutor

Frum goes on to write that Trump and his supporters have devised a series of "self-serving rules" where "fraud and violence must prevail" but only invoke democratic ideals when it suits them for propaganda purposes.

"How should people who are serious about democratic principles respond to this avalanche of bad faith? Democratic ideals don’t cease to be true just because they can be exploited by dishonest actors," Frum writes. "Yet democracy also cannot become an optional principle that authoritarians can use when it suits them and then discard without consequences when it becomes an obstacle to their goals."

Now that he's been thrown off the ballot in two states, Trump wants democracy's protections after betraying democracy for years, Frum concluded.

Read the full op-ed at The Atlantic.