Post from Truth Social

“LEFT’S GOAL: REMOVE TRUMP FROM BALLOT BY ANY MEANS”

Video transcript 6:23

All right, joining me now, Saul Weisenberg, former deputy independent counsel and Fox News contributor, alongside Mike Davis, Article 3 project president, Saul. I was going back to that 2016 piece in the Washington Post about getting the electors to not represent the popular vote. I had forgotten about that piece completely until today. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, huh, that sounds like kind of a little bit of a radical theory in some circles, certainly. But nobody was thinking that would be part of a criminal conspiracy if anyone even thought to implement it. That was interesting. Oh, yeah, it's it's it's completely hypocritical. Of course, they would say that President Trump went further on January 6th. But there's no question that it's hypocritical. And this is more more of the same. Can you think of anything more anti-democratic than the idea that some state functionary, some state secretary of state can declare on his or her own? Well, I think Donald Trump has engaged in insurrection or rebellion under the as understood in the 14th Amendment without any kind of a trial, without any kind of process, without any kind of definition. It's just ludicrous. And to Saul's point, Mike, some states are already considering this 14th Amendment theory that we all talked about for the first time. I think last week, the week before, here's the Michigan secretary of state. Watch this. I'm going to follow the law. What the law says is what is going to dictate how I and I hope all of my colleagues proceed in this moment, in particular around thorny issues like this one. I'm going to be talking with Al Schmidt in Pennsylvania, with Cisco Aguilar in Nevada, with Brad Raffensperger. Mike, I hope they all immediately reject this, what seems to me completely unconstitutional nonsense. Well, it is unconstitutional. There is an article out by Stanford Law Professor Michael McDonald, a former federal judge who makes it very clear he's not a Trump supporter by any means, but he makes it very clear that this is a bogus legal theory by the Democrats. In order to disqualify under the 14th Amendment, you have to follow a federal statute on insurrection and rebellion. A criminal statute get a criminal conviction with a judge and a jury, and it has to stand up on appeal before you can even consider this. There is no evidence whatsoever of insurrection. Democrats looked for several years with the January 6th Commission, and they found zero evidence because it doesn't exist. Yeah, so, Sol, he wasn't charged with an insurrection account of insurrection. The wide-ranging RICO conspiracy in Fulton County, insurrection, as much as they like to talk about it, there was no sense of an intent to violently overthrow the government. This whole theory rests on, I think, a fallacious understanding of even what the basic facts are in this case. Well, here's the problem with the theory. If we were starting from scratch, it's not like there's a complete lack of support historically for this conception of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The problem is, in 1869, there was an opinion by Chief Justice Salmon Chase of the Supreme Court. He wasn't sitting as a Supreme Court justice, he was sitting as a circuit judge, but he made a ruling that's been considered definitive for about 150 years, and what he said was, this is not self-executing, this Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that there has to be congressional enforcement. And as Mike pointed out, Congress has passed a statute that tracks the exact words of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, it makes it a crime to engage in insurrection or rebellion against the government, or to incite it, or to give aid and comfort to its enemies, and the punishment, in addition to the criminal fine, is that you cannot ever hold office again, so it's been done. Again, the idea that you would have some state official, a partisan, partisanly elected state official disqualify Trump without any kind of due process at all, I think is not going to fly. And listen, I think one of them's going to do it, and when they do, I think it'll move up rapidly through the courts, I certainly hope it does, and I think it'll be rejected by the Supremes. Yeah, I mean, you could see, right? This is gaining momentum, and we pegged it when Ludwig and Larry Tribe came out. We knew that this was going to be a boulder going down the hill, but Trump's lawyers were in court today on the January 6th case. Judge Amy Chutkin said, "I understand Mr. Trump is presumed innocent, as is every defendant. Let's not overlook the fact that Mr. Trump has considerable resources that every defendant does not usually have." And this was, I guess, regarding the timing of the case, which we're going to get into later on. But Mike, do you detect, just from that comment from the judge, I mean, that seems to speak to some anti-Trump bias right there. This Obama judge is a left-wing radical. She's been the harshest. She's a left-wing radical. She's been the harshest sentencer of January 6th defendants while she excuses the BLM protesters. There's no chance that President Trump is going to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C. with Judge Tonya Chutkin, Jack Smith, and this 95% Trump-deranged jury pool. Well, Saul, do you think it's possible to get a fair jury outcome for Donald Trump in D.C. and with a D.C. jury? I think it's virtually impossible if there was ever a case that called for a change of bend. You forget about the judge. Just because of the jury panel in D.C., I think that would happen. Unfortunately, the law is very bad on this. There's the Supreme Court opinion, the skilling opinion, which we think of as important because of honest services. Part of the ruling was that they didn't have to move the Enron trial out of Houston, so it's going to be very tough to do that. Yeah, I don't think they're going to win on that one. Saul and Mike, as always, thank you.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.

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AI Analysis

Machine-generated analysis of the post above on 2026-03-20. Not written by the author of the post.

Danger Level
Elevated
Narcissistic State
Vulnerable
Authorship
Uncertain
Intensity
72%

Five days after his Fulton County mugshot and following Judge Chutkan's March 4, 2024 trial date order, Trump posts a nine-word conspiratorial frame that compresses four independent criminal processes into a single political conspiracy. The post is clinically significant as a concentrated expression of vulnerable narcissism under compound injury: public booking humiliation plus trial date perceived as deliberate electoral sabotage. The DARVO structure is maximally compressed — legal accountability becomes political persecution in a single declarative sentence. The "by any means" construction is the most analytically important element: it signals the opponent has abandoned ethical constraint, which retroactively authorizes unlimited counter-response by followers and subject alike. Third-person "TRUMP" mythologizes the defendant as a symbol, transforming his legal jeopardy into a collective cause. Defense mechanisms present include pathological distortion (four independent judicial processes collapsed into one conspirator), projection (subject's own boundary violations attributed to opponents), and denial (implicit total dismissal of legal merit). Paranoid features are dominant (~0.78). Authorship leans slightly toward aide-assisted given business-hours timing and curated daily content pattern. Danger level is elevated: no explicit violent language, but the framing constructs the cognitive architecture in which extreme follower response is narratively coherent. The post's brevity limits cognitive analysis; no markers detected in the available text.

Authorship Analysis
Uncertain
Indicators:
  • Post is a video caption/headline, not a standalone text post — formatting consistent with aide-curated media sharing
  • UTC 21:27 = ~5:27 PM EDT (Trump likely at Bedminster, NJ in late August); business-hours timing favors aide involvement
  • All-caps declarative headline format is used by both Trump and his communications staff
  • Surrounding posts that day are all external URL shares — suggests systematic content-curation workflow
  • No typos, no ellipses, no stream-of-consciousness digression — unusually clean for authentic Trump
Psychological Profile
▶ State
Vulnerable State

Trigger: Narcissistic Injury — Exposure (Fulton County booking (Aug 24) + Chutkan's March 4, 2024 trial date + emerging 14th Amendment ballot-eligibility challenges)

Rage: Intensity 65% targeting Unnamed 'Left' as undifferentiated enemy collective

Proportionality
20%
Sentiment
-0.78
▶ Clinical
Malignant Narcissism:
Narcissistic
72%
Antisocial
50%
Paranoid
78%
Sadism
10%
Defense Mechanisms:
distortionprojectiondenial
Cognitive Complexity:
Complexity
15%
Parasocial Techniques:
Direct address via conspiratorial framing invites audience into shared victimhoodUndefined collective enemy ('the Left') allows followers to project any adversary into the roleExistential stakes framing activates tribal protective instincts
Danger Assessment

Elevated

Indicators:
  • 'By any means' framing positions opponents as having abandoned all ethical limits, implicitly authorizing unlimited counter-response
  • Delegitimization of judicial processes as purely political instruments undermines followers' acceptance of legal outcomes as binding
  • Existential stakes framing ('remove from ballot') activates tribal protective response that can justify extreme action
  • Part of high-volume curated content day that cumulatively constructs a persecution narrative with no off-ramp
  • Stochastic terrorism pattern partially present: target identified ('the Left' and by implication their agents), grievance articulated (ballot removal = disenfranchisement), no explicit action call but narrative logic implies necessity of resistance
Gaslighting Detected:
  • DARVO operation: four independent evidence-based grand jury processes recast as coordinated partisan ballot manipulation
  • Rapid revisionism of ongoing legal reality — proceedings that began under Republican-appointed officials presented as purely Democratic political weapons
  • Epistemic closure demand: accepting the 'Left's goal' frame as fact required for in-group membership
  • Denial of documented reality: emerging legal challenges to ballot eligibility were at scholarly discussion stage, not operational conspiracy
Reality Distortions:
  • Four legally distinct criminal processes (two federal, two state) collapsed into single conspirator with single goal
  • Judicial accountability framed as ballot removal — conflates criminal prosecution with electoral disqualification
  • 14th Amendment scholarly discourse (not yet operationalized in any state proceeding) presented as active operational conspiracy
  • 'The Left' as unitary actor capable of coordinating across independent federal and state judicial systems
Fact Checks (2)
"The Left's goal is to remove Trump from the ballot"
Mostly False

At the time of posting (Aug 29, 2023), no state had initiated proceedings to remove Trump from any ballot. 14th Amendment disqualification challenges were in legal scholarship and early advocacy phase; no state had acted. The criminal prosecutions are legally distinct from ballot removal mechanisms. Framing prosecution as ballot removal conflates separate legal concepts.

"Opposition is pursuing removal 'by any means'"
Unverifiable

Characterization of opponents' willingness to use unlimited or unethical methods is a political opinion claim not amenable to factual verification. The rhetorical function of the phrase is to eliminate ethical constraint on counter-response rather than to describe a documentable fact.

No contradictions with other posts detected yet.

Daily Digest Five Days After His Mugshot, Trump Declares Justice 'Officially Dead' While Flooding the Zone with Vindication

Trump spent the day processing the aftershocks of his historic Fulton County mugshot, alternating between declarations of political persecution and boasts of surging poll numbers. The morning opened with controlled grievance about his indictments before pivoting to claims about rising polls and a re...

Analyzed
22
Rage Level
38%
Max Danger
Elevated
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