Donald Trump was not the first celebrity presidential candidate who could reasonably be accused of insurrection against the United States. Many decades before Trump, another best-selling author and charismatic leader in a rowdy movement to upend dominant American political mores aimed for the U.S. presidency—Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' minister of information and the author of Soul on Ice.
Unlike Trump, who this year overcame challenges from Colorado, Maine, and Illinois about his eligibility due to the Constitution's Insurrection Clause, Cleaver couldn't be caught up by the 14th Amendment, Section 3, since that explicitly only bars insurrectionists who had already been government officials. But Cleaver faced his own eligibility hurdles.
