Donald Trump is set to become the 47th president on Jan. 20. In a last-ditch effort to keep him out of office, thousands are expected to show up in Washington D.C. and elsewhere this weekend to pressure lawmakers to refuse to certify his win.
If they’re successful, Vice President Kamala Harris (D) would become president.
The first woman to successfully sue Trump during his first presidency, his former 2016 staffer Jessica Denson, has spent the last two months advocating for him to be disqualified from the presidency. Denson accused his campaign of harassment and sued to overturn her non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
Recently, she’s been joined in the effort to keep him out of office by high-profile legal experts.
They are among those who argue that the 14th Amendment bars Trump from becoming president. That amendment prohibits current and former officials who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office. They claim that Trump’s involvement in the Capitol riot means just that.
The protest, which began today in Washington, D.C. and continues through the weekend, is called 14th Now. They’re using the hashtag #14thNow to promote it online.
On the demonstration’s permit application, which the Daily Dot obtained, an event organizer wrote that estimated participation would include “upwards of 10,000 to potentially 50,000” people. Mike Litterst, chief of communications for the National Mall and Memorial Parks, told me the issued yet still-pending permit would ultimately contain a final estimate of crowd size.
The application also states that there is reason to believe “MAGA organizations” might try to disrupt the event. So far, that has not occurred.
There is elevated law enforcement presence in the nation’s capital. Congress counting and certifying electoral votes on Monday, the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot, has been designated a national special security event. Meanwhile, the city’s Metropolitan Police Department is on heightened alert as a result of the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks on New Year’s Day.
Denson’s YouTube video promoting the protest has been viewed over 125,000 times. Posts on Bluesky and X promoting the march and related events by Denson and YourAnonCentral have been reposted hundreds of times and liked thousands of times cumulatively.
By phone, Denson told the Daily Dot the goal of the march is “to change the appetite, or lack of appetite, of the lawmakers to uphold their oaths” by rejecting certification of Trump’s electoral votes.
#14thNOW speakers at Franklin Park on Friday included Mark Graber, a constitutional law professor at the University of Maryland; journalist Andrea Chalupa of the Gaslit Nation podcast; and others. Tomorrow, journalist Kaitlin Byrd and more plan to speak at the Lincoln Memorial. A third demonstration is expected there on Sunday as well.
The activists are encouraging those not attending in person to reach out to their members of Congress and ask them to object to certification of Trump’s electoral votes.
Can Trump still be disqualified from office?
Experts say there are ample legal grounds for disqualifying Trump from office under the 14th Amendment. Evan A. Davis and David M. Schulte, former editors of the Columbia Law Review and Yale Law Journal, respectively, recently wrote in the Hill that if a fifth of the members of each chamber of Congress object in writing to certification of enough of his Electoral College votes, and a majority of the members in each house vote to sustain, then he cannot take office.
They pointed to three legal proceedings as evidence Trump is an insurrectionist barred from holding office under the 14th Amendment. (Trump’s 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records do not prohibit him from the presidency.)
One proceeding is the bipartisan Jan. 6 Committee, which determined in December 2022 that Trump “unlawfully pressured State officials and legislators to change the results of the election” in 2020 and that his “false allegations that the election was stolen” summoned “tens of thousands of supporters” to D.C., where he encouraged their armed and violent Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Drawing on the Jan. 6 Committee’s findings, Davis and Schulte wrote that “Trump unlawfully demanded that his vice president, Mike Pence, throw out votes in the Electoral College for political opponent Joe Biden, a power [Pence] did not have. While the riot was in progress, Trump used Pence’s rejection of his demand to further inflame the crowd and cause them to chant ‘Hang Mike Pence!’”
They also pointed to Trump’s second impeachment trial in February 2021. The House of Representatives impeached him for inciting insurrection, but while a majority of Senators voted to find him guilty, the Senate failed to secure the two-thirds vote required to convict him.
Finally, Davis and Schulte note that, as the Supreme Court wrote in March 2024, “After a five-day trial, the [Colorado] state District Court found that former President Trump had ‘engaged in insurrection’ within the meaning of” the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court did not address that finding further, concluding rather that “responsibility for enforcing” the relevant portion of the amendment rests with Congress, not the states.
In the event Congress sustains enough objections to Trump’s electoral votes, the authors wrote, Harris, the only presidential candidate remaining with Electoral College votes, would be declared president. Republicans have a somewhat slim majority in both chambers of the new 119th Congress, which convened for the first time Friday.
Harris publicly conceded the Nov. 5 election less than 16 hours after television networks called the contest for her Republican opponent. But she remains the Democratic presidential candidate since such concessions, for all their social power, lack the force of law. (No one has evidenced grounds for disqualifying any of her electoral votes under the controlling Electoral Count Act.)
The Kamala Harris campaign, the Democratic Party, and Marc Elias, a top election lawyer for the party and Harris, did not reply to inquiries about whether there are any plans to contest Trump’s electoral votes. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to an email.
There is yet another possible outcome.
“My main goal in co-authoring the piece is to secure respect for the Constitution[,]” Davis told me by email. “Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that the disability of an insurrectionist may be removed by a two-thirds vote in each house. That outcome would meet my goal.”
In other words, if two-thirds of each chamber votes to remove Trump’s status as an insurrectionist and thus render him eligible for the presidency, Davis feels this would comply with constitutional requirements.
What inspired former staffer Denson to act?
Denson said she put a call out on her show, Lights On with Jessica Denson, because she saw no movement from lawmakers, “and that the only way to change that calculus was to have a significant showing of people protesting this peacefully.”
Based on back-end assessment of registrations on the protest march website, she told me she expects thousands to attend.
Denson emphasized that an “actual physical show of people peacefully demanding that Congress do their job is necessary to change the conversation. Generations will look back to this very precious window of time as the dividing line between freedom and fascism. This is our last chance to make our mark in this moment in history.”
She said that too often, people in the U.S. take things for granted and assume they don’t have to show up.
Conversely, she said, “We have so many beautiful examples of people all around the world protesting Russian interference, like in Georgia recently, in their country’s election. They understand what the consequences are; we’re at risk of finding out what’s coming for us.”
“If we have one iota of the courage they had, to put our bodies out there, to protest peacefully, we could change the course of history.”
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