Trump Call to Terminate Constitution Is 'Disqualifying': Harvard Professor

Authored by newsweek.com and submitted by Powerful_Raccoon_141
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Donald Trump's call for the "termination" of the U.S. Constitution over his election loss in 2020 should be disqualifying, according to one constitutional scholar.

The former president on Friday took to his alternative social media platform, Truth Social, with a reaction to the so-called "Twitter Files," a series of internal messages between leaders at Twitter discussing the botched handling of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Despite many pundits concluding that the messages reveal nothing that was not already known, some conservatives, including Trump, insist that they show collusion between Democratic leaders and "Big Tech."

In his Truth Social post, Trump asserted that the Twitter revelations were sufficient enough to either invalidate the results of the 2020 election and declare him the "RIGHTFUL WINNER" or to hold a new election. Furthermore, he claimed that "Massive Fraud" of that sort should be enough "for the termination of all our rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

Trump's final point about the U.S. Constitution drew a wave of new alarm over his rhetoric, with commentators decrying his call to abandon the founding document in the pursuit of regaining power. One of the prominent legal figures to weigh in on the post was Laurence Tribe, a prominent constitutional scholar and Harvard University professor.

"Former president #DonaldTrump, still the GOP's most likely 2024 presidential nominee, on his misnamed platform, 'TruthSocial,' actually called today (on 12/3/22) for 'suspending the Constitution' to overturn the 2020 election, citing false conspiracy theories about election fraud," Tribe wrote in an initial tweet reacting to the news on Saturday.

In a follow-up tweet the following day, the professor noted that while calls to abandon the Constitution are not unheard of in legal circles, the context of Trump doing so in order to retake power should be disqualifying for him.

"Constitution-trashing in itself isn't disqualifying: some leading legal scholars have written academic articles urging the Constitution's abandonment," Tribe wrote. "What's disqualifying is trying to do it to seize power for oneself and one's faction as Trump is doing."

In his follow-up tweet, Tribe also included a link to a Washington Post article that was published on Saturday about the White House's sharp rebuke of Trump's comments, including a statement from spokesman Andrew Bates in which he referred to the Constitution as a "sacrosanct document."

"Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned," Bates wrote. "You cannot only love America when you win."

Newsweek reached out to Trump's representatives for comment.

On Friday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the social media platform would post "what really happened with the Hunter Biden [laptop] story suppression by Twitter."

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted a series of internal conversations from Twitter staff discussing how they will censor users from sharing the New York Post article as it violated the platform's "distribution of hacked materials" policy.

Hunter's laptop has been at the center of speculation and controversy since the newspaper's story first broke. Emails allegedly written by Biden's son appear to show terms of agreements with Chinese and Ukrainian companies. One of the emails found in the laptop suggests that Hunter arranged a meeting between his father and a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, in 2015, when then-Vice President Biden was in charge of Ukraine-U.S. policy.

The information for the newspaper's story was said to have been supplied by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he obtained it from a MacBook Pro belonging to Hunter.

After originally dismissing the reports as potential misinformation and casting doubt on its authenticity, The Washington Post and The New York Times later found that thousands of emails, which formed the basis of the story, did come from a computer that Hunter reportedly dropped off at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, in April 2019, but never picked up.

However, The Washington Post said in March that the emails provide "little new insight" into Hunter's work for Burisma and that they do not implicate the president.

AlertThinker on December 5th, 2022 at 12:37 UTC »

GOP: "That's not what he meant! You are twisting his words.”

One week later, on FoxNews where Trump has a sit down with Hannity

Trump: "The Constitution should be terminated --"

Hannity: "You don't really mean that, sir."

Trump: "Yes, I do. The Democrats STOLE the election. The constitution has no value. Terminate it."

GOP: "Ok, maybe that's what he meant but he didn't MEAN IT."

SuperstitiousPigeon5 on December 5th, 2022 at 12:31 UTC »

How many times does he need to be disqualified before he can't run.

I suspect if he began saying god told him to run, and that he has regular conversations with god about day to day activities he'd still pull 30%.

LA-forthewin on December 5th, 2022 at 12:26 UTC »

His base doesn't care what he says or does. He knows that he could say or do anything egregious and get away with it. He could call for the assassination of the sitting president and they'd shrug it off, and unfortunately the rest of the Republicans are too craven to stand up and denounce him