I appreciate this article; as someone who was very much in favor of banning Trump from office, it gave me pause to go back and reconsider my thoughts, and that is certainly worth doing. I'll address that at the end.

While I appreciate the article, I'm uncertain overall as to the conclusion of this piece. It seems a bit unfocused. In the top sections, it posits some relative certainty that the power to disqualify is dangerous and should be banned or very limited, and also mixes pragmatic concerns (issues of damage to democracies' functions) with moral / ethical considerations (is it "fair" to disqualify someone) without explicitly addressing issues distinctly; I think both are valid considerations, but they are separate. In the final argument, it doesn't commit to much: "it should be delicately handled if we care about democracy." That's vague to the point of incoherence.

The middle sections are a summary of various disqualifications internationally. Each one is presented as a separate case, and very little analysis has been done to categorize them, compare / contrast them, or show how they lead to a specific set of conclusions and / or dangers, and what aspects of those are universal as opposed to what are very particular to that time and place.

If the point of this piece is that we should use the tools of democracy -- many of which can damage democracies badly -- carefully, the only response is a chorus of "well duh." I'd love to see a lot more analysis on the specific set of issues that arise, how we can learn from the rest of the world's examples, and what specifically it looks like to use disqualification powers "delicately."

Regarding my thoughts on Trump: I still think he should have been convicted and disqualified from federal office. He is, I hope, an outlier -- equal parts pugnacious, mendacious, and administratively incompetent, yet having a keen sense of the appeal of the appearance of a certain type of strength and a cracking ability to project it. However, that's not why he should be disqualified; he should be disqualified because from run up to the election, and then from election night to nearly inauguration, he repeatedly claimed to have won the election by a landslide and been the victim of massive fraud without providing any evidence of his claims. He did this for months. If one is charitable, one might say "lied" is not the right word, because Trump actually believed his own words, but at this point, I'm done with psychoanalyzing Trump. He was making very large claims of massive fraud with woefully insufficient evidence to support them. That is grossly irresponsible and it is corrosive to democracy. A person willing to do that has no business in public office.