Writing in his Daily Mail column on Friday, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson blasted the Maine and Colorado decisions to try to keep former President Donald J. Trump off the ballot for the 2024 presidential elections.
Johnson, who has routinely been unkind about Trump, wrote of how the authoritarian attempts to keep Trump off the ballot make it impossible for Western nations to claim the moral high ground against dictatorships when their ruling elite classes act in the very same way:
Can we really say that it is the sovereign people, and the people alone, who get to decide who makes the law? I don’t think we can say that of the United States, today, where another court has just decided that Donald Trump’s name should not appear on the ballot paper for next year’s Presidential election. The judges of Maine have joined the judges of Colorado in effectively banning former President Trump from presenting himself as a candidate. I am amazed that this is not causing more general consternation.
Making clear he thinks Trump lost in 2020 while calling January 6th “dismaying”, the former Mayor of London also insisted that [Trump] did not prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and “has not been convicted of an insurrection, or an attempted insurrection.”
Refering to the former President as “an innocent man,” Johnson explains: “…think how this looks in the eyes of the rest of the world — all the places where they are fed up with being lectured about the joys of Western liberal democracy. Across the world there are dictatorial and sometimes brutal leaders who use a corrupt judicial system to disbar their opponents from seeking elective office.
“That is to say, they fabricate some charge against them at least to tie them up in legal knots — and, if necessary, actually send them to prison.
“It’s what they do in Venezuela — President Nicolas Maduro did it to his opponent. It’s what Putin did to the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It’s what the Tatmadaw in Burma have done to Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s what they used to do in Ukraine — the Kremlin lackey Yanukovich locked up his opponent Yulia Timoshenko.
“Why do they lock them up? Because they are frightened of their potential popularity; because they will do anything they can to stop them appearing before the electorate.”
Johnson concludes: “It is four years since the deplorable events of January 6, 2020. The American public have had lots of time to decide what they think of Trump’s handling of the matter. They, and they alone, should decide whether he is fit for another term.”
