The Trump haters, both Democrat and Republican, appear to have reached Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s second stage of grief.

No longer in denial that Donald Trump can win the presidency, they’ve advanced to the anger stage as they grudgingly come to grips with the abject weakness of Joe Biden’s candidacy and the overwhelming strength of Trump’s polling among Republican primary voters.

As much as it pains them to admit it, most Trump haters now realize that Le Bête Orange could actually win the presidency next year.

We know this because they’ve gotten desperate. Take Colorado, for example, where last Wednesday a leftist group calling itself Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit to keep Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot.

Colorado’s CREW claims Trump is now ineligible to run for president due to an obscure section of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. (We debunked this argument last month, but the Democrats clearly weren’t listening.)

Virginia Democrat Senator and failed vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine apparently agrees with the CREW argument, saying he believes “a strong legal argument can be made to use the 14th Amendment to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot in 2024.”

“In my view,” “the attack on the Capitol that day was designed for a particular purpose at a particular moment, and that was to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power of as is laid out in the Constitution. So I think there’s a powerful argument to be made.”

Citizen Kaine explained his crackpot legal theory with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, just as many other Trump haters have begun to do. As we noted, their argument is based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — an amendment passed in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War. Indeed, the 13th, 14th, and 15th are known as the “Civil War Amendments” or the “Reconstruction Amendments.” Section 3 reads as follows:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Interestingly, this language specifically names “Senator” and “Representative” as elective offices to which rebels and insurrectionists are ineligible, but there’s no mention of the presidency. That’s because Section 3 was written specifically to keep the postbellum Confederate states from electing and sending their senior Civil War leadership to Congress. Thus, if we’re to apply the authors’ original meaning, the authentic constitutional meaning, to Section 3, we can dismiss it as utterly irrelevant to the Democrats’ desperate efforts to keep Trump off the ballot.

Bestselling author and constitutional scholar Mark Levin provides a brilliant legal and historical takedown of the Democrats’ 14th Amendment folly, but suffice it to say, the relevance of Section 3 died with the last member of the Confederacy.

As Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton opined: “Dems are nervous because Americans know Joe Biden wrecked the economy and is mentally unfit to serve. But that’s no reason to take the radical, illegal, and unAmerican step of partisan AGs and secretaries of state removing opponents from the ballot.”

Cotton adds, “Whether it’s packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, making D.C. a state, or weaponizing the justice system, they’ll do anything for power.”

Cotton doesn’t mention Trump by name, but Jim Geraghty at National Review certainly does and makes the right points:

Attempting to keep Trump off the ballot in this manner is a bad idea. It is a bad idea because Trump has not yet been convicted of leading an insurrection. It is a bad idea because Trump has not yet been indicted on a charge of leading an insurrection. … As our Andy McCarthy lays out, this is not because prosecutors just forgot to indict Trump on this charge. It is because federal prosecutors “can’t prove Trump committed insurrection,” which, when you think about it, is a pretty darn big stumbling block. … Finally, attempting to block Trump from being listed as a candidate on the general-election ballot is a bad idea because if you want Trump and his philosophy defeated, then you want him defeated at the ballot box.

Exactly that. The Democrats are always prattling on about how Trump is “a threat to our democracy” (it’s a republic, but whatever), and yet they’re doing everything they can to keep him off the campaign trail and off the ballot in 2024, thereby denying the people a chance to decide this matter themselves. So who, exactly, is threatening our democracy?

As for their attacks on Trump, the multiple indictments and the 91 charges across four jurisdictions have clearly backfired so far, but the Democrats are pressing on nonetheless in friendly territory with hack prosecutors whose sleazy tactics have been repudiated 9-0 in the Supreme Court, and whose documented bias flies in the face of a defendant’s right to due process, and whose jury pools align as much as 19-to-1 in favor of Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

Of course, when it comes to Trump, the Democrats are sniveling cowards, and their actions of late prove it. A few months ago, they were crowing about how they beat him once [sic] and they’ll beat him again. But they don’t seem quite so sanguine these days — not with Trump running away with the Republican primary. And not with their guy wrecking our country, making us a laughingstock among nations, stumbling through even the simplest of prepared remarks, and polling around 39% even when friendlies such as CNN are asking the questions. Heck, a recent AP-NORC poll showed that 77% of the American people think Joe Biden is too old to be effective — and that number includes 69% of Democrats.

There’s still plenty of campaigning to be done between now and the Republican National Convention next July, but Trump is running away with it. The latest Morning Consult poll, for example, has Trump leading his nearest challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 60% to 15%. On the other side, we still expect the Democrat Party to force Biden into an LBJ moment, especially if his polling numbers continue to slide. The Democrats are nothing if not ruthless in their quest for power.

As for when The Party of Joe Biden might advance through the final three of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, that’ll likely depend on the American voter. And that’s just as it should be.