It has been almost eight years since Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower and defiled American society with his racist rantings, his lunacies, his demagoguery, and his hostility to every precept concept of Americanism, the American idea,
the American ideal, the history of the country. Trump is utterly, completely and totally ignorant of all of these things, which puts him in good stead along with the overwhelming majority of Americans who also have no idea about the country's idea, its ideals, and its precepts. The collapse of civics education around the meaning of the country, its point, its purpose, its story, has taken us to this most dangerous hour. There is no question that Donald Trump incited and led
an insurrection against the lawful, peaceful transition of power. Donald Trump tried to stage a coup. He sent a mob and it invaded the capital. And it is not accidental that when that mob came, they were carrying the Confederate battle flag and they paraded it through the capital rotunda, breaching the capital, something the Confederacy was unable to achieve during the Civil War. There are significant consequence that have occurred because of this insurrection. There have been hundreds of
criminal convictions. Many people have been imprisoned. Trump was impeached and he faces criminal counts in jurisdictions across the country. The Colorado Supreme Court has issued a ruling, and the ruling is that Donald Trump may not appear on the Colorado ballot. He will be stricken from it under Section three of the fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was ratified in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
In its design was to keep top officials of the Confederate government from serving again in the United States government. It's also important to remember that of the Civil War, the American leader, President Abraham Lincoln, talked about with malice towards none and charity towards all. The simple truth is that after the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of Confederate soldiers and officers and officeholders were paroled. They were freed. The condition of the parole was a commitment to never
again take up arms against the United States. Another event occurred last night that is worthy of note, and it's tragic. The Lincoln Memorial was desecrated with red paint, then spelled
out free Palestine, give Back the land. The temple that houses the spirit and memory of the man who saved the Union was defaced when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in nineteen twenty two by President Warren G. Harding, who received it for the nation from the president of the commission that built it, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft,
a former President of the United States. And what Harding talked about that day was that the temple that was received by the American government that enshrines the memory of Abraham Lincoln was not for that generation. It was not a gift for the old men who had fought in the war to remember their achievements and their victories. As Warren Harding pointed out, the gift of the Lincoln Memorial was for all of us, this generation, and the next
and the next after that. The Lincoln Memorial is a reminder about the perpetuity of the American Union and its indivisibility. But more importantly, it is a stake in the ground about who is sovereign in the United States. Lincoln talked about this all the time. He made the point that a minority that threatens the majority with secession, as was the case in that time, seeks to undermine democracy with a belligerence that says, we will destroy what we cannot
achieve through a majority. And the only defense of freedom that there can ever be is majoritarian. A system where the majority decides and minority rights are protected is the system of government that protects all in any from despotism. That is what Donald Trump challenged. What Donald Trump did was assault the American Constitution as firmly and with as much conviction as the Confederate States of America did. He sought to tear down Americanism. He sought to erase the
American civilization. He sought to crack the foundation. What is the foundation of the American Republic? It is the idea that the citizen is sovereign. There are no kings or lords or emperors, barons or viscounts in America. There is no title gentry, just citizens, and those citizens decide every four years, in a great recurring drama, who it is that will be the head of state, who it is that will be the commander in chief, who will be
the president. Presidents don't pick the time of their power. The American people decide who is granted for a time lawful executive authority constrained by the American Constitution, which protects the rights of the individual and places them higher than the authority of the elected official. In fact, the American system removes the power of elected officials to take away fundamental rights that are granted in the American system not by men, but by God, the Creator, as he is
referred to in the Declaration of Independence. Ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator, his opposition has searched for the magic bullet. With each speech, with each degradation, with each offense, we have arrived at moments where people said, well, now, finally this will be the end. The grab them by, the on access Hollywood, the shakedown of the Ukrainian president, the insults towards John McCain, the fact that he did not want to go to an American cemetery in France.
He has insulted POW's our war dead, the United States and wounded soldiers. At each instance somebody has gone on and said, this is the end for Donald Trump. And so it is. Again. We are in the middle of a game that is reminiscent of Charlie Brown and Lucy and their kabuki with the football, where each time Charlie Brown would run at the football ready to kick it,
and each time Lucy would pull it away. And so it is that the American people and the Trump opposition are deeply invested in the idea now that the Supreme Court of the United States will affirm the Colorado decision and remove Donald Trump from the ballot. But we have to think about this soberly and seriously and understand the impact. There is no shortcut here. There is no easy way around Donald Trump. This matter will not, cannot, and must
not be decided by lawyers in a courtroom. How can it be that an opposition that has rightfully talked about Donald Trump's degradations towards the American Republic and the threat that he provides to democracy seek to remove him by denying the American people the choice to choose him if they so wish to be the commander in chief, which in my view will end catastrophically and likely and the American Republic. But that choice is the choice of this
generation of Americans. And this is what Abraham Lincoln understood. If our choice is to be national suicide, so be it. I hope that will not be the case, but there will be a tremendous backlash to any type of maneuver by a court that seeks to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, because it's not the court's job to remove him from the ballot. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, written after the Civil War, it is the American people's job to keep him from power and to keep an illiberal cabal
of corrupt, dangerous lunatic from taking power with him. If the American people's indifference to their own freedom and liberty is so great they're indifference to the blood sacrifice of a million who sustained liberty against all threats foreign and domestic, is so great that they cannot see the danger, that they cannot see what will happen, then there is no court decision that can save us from Trump, because Trump will have already won. The United States of America is
the greatest idea in all of human history. It is the greatest and grandest experiment in all of human history, the ideal that ordinary people of all creeds and backgrounds and races can govern them. It has taken almost two hundred and fifty years to arrive at the moment where freedom means freedom for everybody in America. The question at hand is not a legal question. It is a civilizational question. It is paramount that we understand the choice at hand.
The choice will be made by the American people, not by Supreme Court justices, and any attempt, no matter how well intentioned, and no matter how it is framed as being part of a rule of law, that is supreme. The simple truth is the removal of a former president who is going to be the Republican nominee from a ballot across the States because of what he did but has not been convicted for, will wreck American democracy as
surely as Donald Trump's election will. The American people have to show love for their country by participating in its governing. There is no workaround for citizenship. The failure to practice it will mean a loss of our children's freedom. And that's what this moment is truly about.