According to failed one-term former president Donald Trump and his attorneys, he had absolutely no duty to “support” the Constitution while in office because the oath he took when he was inaugurated didn’t specify anything about supporting the document and the laws based upon it.
Trump’s bizarre argument comes as part of an attempt by lawyers for the disgraced ex-president to have a lawsuit dismissed that would have him disqualified from appearing on the 2024 ballot in the state of Washington.
The lawsuit was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The group argues the 14th Amendment — which prohibits anyone who has “engaged in insurrection” against the United States from holding any civil, military, or elected office unless two-thirds of both the House and Senate approve of it — makes it clear that Trump’s actions to overturn the 2020 election and his connections to the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection have disqualified him, meaning he has no legal right to appear as a candidate.
Trump’s attorneys, however, argue that the word “support” doesn’t appear in the oath of office he took at his inauguration, according to Brandi Buchman of Law & Crime.
“The Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution — not to ‘support’ the Constitution,” the Trump filing reads. “Because the framers chose to define the group of people subject to Section Three by an oath to ‘support’ the Constitution of the United States, and not by an oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment never intended for it to apply to the President.”
Trump is also facing removal from the ballot in other states, including Colorado and Minnesota.
The former president has been indicted on 91 criminal charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. Those cases revolve around his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
