Talk:Presidential eligibility of Donald Trump

Valuable addition
Vox, The fraught debate over whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump, explained

Levitsky and Ziblatt's arguments, both for and against removing Trump from the ballot, should be covered. AFAIK they're among the few non-legal scholars who have weighed in on the topic, and tied it to the topic of democratic backsliding; the legal aspect isn't the only due one. DFlhb (talk) 11:11, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Michigan Supreme Court decision
The Michigan Supreme Court has just ruled to keep Donald Trump on the state's 2024 ballots. Should this be added to the page? 98.20.149.86 (talk) 16:03, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Legend for state map of eligibility
The lightest shade of grey used isn't defined by the legend. I was briefly confused when the four colours that are defined seemed to imply an exhaustive list, i.e. that every state had responded to a contest in some manner. The graph isn't nuanced enough to provide a different shade for each of the states, but there are three shades of grey. Should another legend item be added to indicate for the whitest shade of pale "not contested", or some such? I ask here to solicit input on whether that should be done, what the "some such" legend should be exactly, and how to determine the hex number for colours that matches what's been used for the map. Thanks for the feedback. signed, Willondon (talk) 01:54, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

P.S. From my understanding of current events, California needs to be shaded as having provided a response to the question. signed, Willondon (talk)
 * California appears to be in kind of an intermediate status. Secretary of State Shirley Weber received "pressure" to leave Trump off the ballot, but an actual lawsuit was never filed. Weber left Trump on the ballot with the reasoning that she had no legal basis to remove him: while some states (like Colorado and Maine) explicitly authorize their secretaries of state to remove presidential candidates from primary ballots if they are determined to be ineligible, California does not. California State Senator Dave Min has proposed a bill that would explicitly grant the secretary of state that power, but it's yet to reach a vote. So, none of the current categories used in the state map seem to apply currently (no case was dismissed, nor lawsuit filed). — nmael (talk) 00:18, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Archiving the references listed in the Works cited section
Thank you for archiving the references on the article! Just curious why the bot did not archive the references included in the Works cited section. If that is possible to do, and if you could do so, that would be most appreciated! Thanks again! -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:21, 2 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Some of it has to do with the DOIs and the SSRNs. They tend to not be archived due to their use as parameters in citation templates. Their archival is usually not necessary, but it can happen. I am less familiar with how the bot handles Congressional Research Service URLs, however. The page itself has a decent number of bytes in it, which might also affect what the bot does. &#8213; Susmuffin Talk 00:41, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Proposal: If I temporarily place the refs cited in the Works cited section in the main text at their first use and remove the Works cited so the sfn refs don't try to call the refs there, would you mind running the bot to see if it archives them? It might create a brief annoyance, but if it ends up archiving the refs I think it's worth it. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:17, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Violent Incidents correction
Should the January 2, 2024, Colorado Supreme Court shooting be removed. Subsequent coverage seems to suggest it was not related to this subject. LAMerryman (talk) 23:06, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

Proposal for inclusion of perspectives by historians under section Constitutional questions, Enforcement of Section 3, and or the Litigation section, Colorado
From The Guardian Cheers. DN (talk) 04:50, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * "Twenty-five historians of the civil war and Reconstruction filed a US supreme court brief in support of the attempt by Colorado to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the 14th amendment, which bars insurrectionists from running for office. The historians concluded: “The court should take cognisance that section three of the 14th amendment covers the present, is forward-looking, and requires no additional acts of Congress for implementation.”"
 * "Some political and legal observers have suggested Trump should be allowed to run regardless of the constitution, because to bar him would be anti-democratic. In a forthcoming article for the New York Review of Books, seen by the Guardian, Sean Wilentz of Princeton – an eminent historian not part of the supreme court brief – calls such arguments “risible”. “By their reasoning,” Wilentz writes, “Trump’s misdeeds aside, enforcement of the 14th amendment poses a greater threat to our wounded democracy than Trump’s candidacy. In the name of defending democracy, they would speciously enable the man who did the wounding and now promises to do much more.”

Addition to public opinion tables
Perhaps the public opinion tables should display another row at the the showing the average? This would be more readable for people who just want to glance at the tables quickly. JustSomeGuy4361 (talk) 17:59, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Summary of YouGov questionnaire result
I saw surprisingly wide differences in the five lists of answer percentages under the heading Trial in federal obstruction case against Trump should occur before the general election in 2024. I checked the sources for the two 'deviating' polls, which were from YouGov Survey: Trump Investigations, performed in December last year and in January this year, respectively. I found that the put questions (number 8 and number 9, respectively) included a third alternative. The results were reported as follows:
 * When do you think trials for the following cases should begin?
 * ... Federal election and Jan. 6 case: 4 charges, including for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to obstruct the certification of the electoral vote. ...
 * Answers December 2023: Before the 2024 election: 42%; After the 2024 election: 19%; Whenever the judge decides, regardless of the timing of the election: 22%; Not sure: 17%.
 * Answers January 2024: Before the 2024 election: 41%; After the 2024 election: 22%; Whenever the judge decides, regardless of the timing of the election: 21%; Not sure: 17%.

(The other three questionnaires asked whether the trial should "take place" before or after the general election.)

Now, CommonKnowledgeCreator@undefined summed up these results as follows: Those answering "Before the 2024 election" were considered to agree with the statement "Trial in federal obstruction case against Trump should occur before the general election in 2024"; those answering either "After the 2024 election" or "Whenever the judge decides, regardless of the timing of the election" were considered to disagree with that statement; and those answering "Not sure" were considered to have no opinion as regards to whether the trial should occur before the election or not. I find this interpretation doubtful for two reasons. First (and the main point): Those who claimed that the decision of the judge should be decisive (regardless of whether that placed the beginning of the trial before or after the election) clearly didn't "agree" with the statement, but IMHO they also clearly didn't "disagree". My second (less weighty) objection is that possibly some answerers who choose the first alternative would have given a different answer to a question about whether the trial should be concluded before the election. Like me, they may have noted that several commentors expect the trial to continue for a long time. This could imply that a trial may "begin" before the election, without "taking place" (entirely or even mainly) before that date.

I do understand that it is hard to sum up polls with differently posed questions in one table. I think that there are some other of our tables with similar troubles. (E. g., IMHO, there is a clear difference between asking (in general) whether attepts to overthrough an election in one or another specified manner is a severe crime, or (in particular) whether the charges against Trump concerning his actions in the federal obstruction case are severe.) This does lessen the value of our tables somewhat; but IMHO by no means make them uninteresting or unimportant. I'll add a reservation along these lines just before the presentation of the polls results; I hope to make this sensible.

Concretely, I ask you to consider moving the percentages for those in the YouGov poll who opted for the "whenever the judge decides" answer from the disagree to the no opinion column (which for the December poll would yeald the percentages [42%, 19%, 39%] rather than the presently entered [42%, 41%, 17%], and similarly for the January poll), since I do not think a "let the judge decide" answer could be construed as either agreeing or disagreeing with a pre-election date (especially, since the judge so far seems to have been in favour of a pre-election start date). However, I'll not press this issue; anyhow, however we present the results, they will be a bit twisted, since that third alternative was available. JoergenB (talk) 19:45, 8 February 2024 (UTC)


 * I have no objection to your request and glad you raised it. I wasn't sure whether to include in the disagree column or no opinion column considering that the pollster provided an additional response option to survey respondents in the later polls that weren't included in the earlier ones. I will make the modifications. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 20:44, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Can we change the color of Colorado, Maine, and Illinois and their meaning?
The Supreme Court reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, making Trump eligible for the ballot.

I think it would help to change the color of those states because the Supreme Court ruled that states can’t remove him from the ballot. Daniel (talk) 15:51, 4 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Maybe just remove the map in general as it doesn't make any sense listing these cases if none of them can remove him from the ballot? Scu ba (talk) 20:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Disparaging amount of op-eds
Just glancing through the references and the vast majority (of the news articles, ie: WashPo, Politico, local coverage) of them are op-eds, and some are even just letters to the editor, which breaks WP:NOROPED. This article needs some serious work on it's sourcing. Scu ba (talk) 20:19, 5 March 2024 (UTC)


 * @Scu ba good luck, Wikipedia is run by far-left disinformation operatives. Jaygo113 (talk) 19:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
 * @Scu ba completely misinforms people, as if Trump was arrested for and found guilty of Insurrection, which never happened. this article is the epitome of misleading. Jaygo113 (talk) 19:58, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Hush money trial
The article currently focuses on the Insurrection Clause, but recently some media articles have been written on presidential eligibility with the hush money trial. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/30/politics/can-trump-still-run-for-president-what-matters/index.html This should be added as a section. Wqwt (talk) 21:54, 2 June 2024 (UTC)