When the Supreme Court overturns Colorado’s verdict, it will hand Trump the most indisputable evidence in favor of a claim he and his supporters have long argued. It will confirm that Trump was the victim of political persecution. Americans of good faith who have argued (myself included) that Trump brought his legal troubles down upon himself will have to concede at least some of that premise to the former president’s defenders.

By then, however, all the perverse incentives this decision is likely to inspire will have had their predictable effect. Republican voters will rally around the president and defend him as they would defend their own individual autonomy. That is, after all, what is in the balance. Republican elected officials — including his presidential-candidate rivals — will echo their voters’ concerns. The prudential arguments against nominating Trump to the presidency for a third time will be drowned out by equally weighty prudential concerns around giving a handful of robes a veto over a political party’s candidate-selection prerogatives.

Perhaps that, too, is a desirable outcome from the Colorado court’s perspective.

[Normally I’d be inclined to apply Hanlon’s Razor to such questions, and credit stupidity rather than ulterior motives. However, this decision is so clearly political in nature — and unconstitutional, as I argued last night and again this morning — that it stretches Hanlon’s Razor to the breaking point. At the very least, this is the court’s hijacking of the civil process to impose its electoral will on the people of Colorado. Whether it’s because they don’t want Trump to compete or are trying to engineer a reverse-Briar Patch strategy is secondary to the corruption this court has demonstrated. — Ed]