Donald Trump has refused to sign a loyalty pledge vowing not to “advocate the overthrow of the government.”
The former president and current frontrunner for the GOP nomination for president in 2024 turned in paperwork in the state of Illinois this week without signing the pledge, according to radio station WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The pledge requires candidates to declare that they are not a communist or a member of any communist groups and that they “do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this State or any unlawful change in the form of the governments thereof by force or any unlawful means.”
Trump signed the pledge during his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, according to WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
President Joe Biden has signed the pledge along with GOP presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Chris Christie also did not sign.
Signing the pledge is not a requirement to appear on the state ballot. But Trump’s refusal to sign, after doing so twice before, is setting off alarm bells considering the news broke on the third anniversary of the day he incited a mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol to overthrow the government.
“I said Donald Trump is willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power. I wasn’t exaggerating,” Biden wrote in a post on X/Twitter.
“Pledging not to overthrow our democracy is a hard thing to do when you’ve already attempted it once,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote.
“Why wouldn’t he sign it?” former Illinois Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger asked the Chicago Sun-Times. “Has he been advised maybe not to sign it because maybe there’s some legal exposures…given that oath, if he signed it, would be a violation of everything he actually did on Jan. 6th, 2021, and leading up to it?”
