No, this isn’t going to help Donald Trump

There’s been a lot of absurd takes about whether or not Donald Trump will be on the ballot in 2024 – but perhaps the most ridiculous one is that somehow the former guy being kicked off is actually a win for him and conservatives everywhere.

A lot of people haven’t been particular about why this is the case, apart from some nonsense about how supposedly President Biden could be kicked off the ballot in a bunch of states for some reason. On Monday, Missouri attempted to jump on that bandwagon, only it’s pretty hard to call the whole thing a win for Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (yes, related to that Ashcroft.)

Ashcroft thought he could just make the empty threat of kicking Joe Biden off the ballot in Missouri, but he didn’t actually think he’d get any media pushback on this at all, which is why he somehow managed to mix up the president and the governor of Florida (really).

During the course of the interview Ashcroft repeated something about allegations of insurrection and President Biden, as though the new GOP strategy involves getting people to associate what the former guy did with the president we have now. It’s a terrible strategy that won’t work – but people like Ashcroft really think the laws are just things they implement to be convenient to themselves. That’s why we need to vote out every last Republican from office on Nov 5.