By James Finck, Ph.D.As we come to the close of 2024, it is worth looking back over this year at some of the highs and lows. Being an election year, and a historical one at that, with only the second time a president has served two nonsequential terms, it is probably not a surprise that most of my columns this year focused on the election. In fact, the first column I wrote in 2024 was about Colorado and Maine both removing Donald Trump on their state’s primary ballots. They justified their decisions with a clause in the 14th Amendment which says no person shall be president that has engaged, “in insurrection or rebellion.” The decision made it to the U.S.Supreme Court that concluded that a state can disqualify a person from state office but not a federal one, allowing Trump on both ballots.In February I looked at an issue brought up by President Joe Biden in a speech where he asked, “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”Biden claimed that Trump wanted to destroy democracy while he was trying to preserve it. The issue I addressed was that Trump was being blocked from the ballots in some Democratic states and the Democratic Party was blocking their own from challenging Biden in the primaries, neither seemed too democratic. I argued while it is not common to compete against a sitting president for the position, it was also not common for a sitting president to have a low 33% approval rating. Also, historically, sitting presidents have been challenged—most recently Lyndon B. Johnson dropped out of the 1968 campaign when he lost a couple of primaries.Democrats suffered another blow in February when Special Counsel Robert Hur released his findings on Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur said that while Biden had mishandled the documents, he would not pursue charges because of the difficulty of convicting Biden because he had “limited precision and recall” and he was “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” The report and visible gaffs from the president left many wondering if Biden was mentally fit for the job.In June it was the Republican Party’s turn to hit a speed bump when Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of the Hush Money Case in New York. Questions at the time were “would he serve jail time?” and “can a convicted felon still run for president?”While I suspected that ...
