With Trump's daily diatribes it's easy to shrug this off as just the latest insult. But no American president has ever publicly accused a predecessor of treason. It is a serious specific charge that often carries with it the penalty of death. And while Trump and his team use the word promiscuously, they also seem to fundamentally misunderstand its meaning.
Team Trump seems to think "treason" is about personal disloyalty. That's fitting for a president who sees everything through the lens of self-interest. But the charge of treason is actually about betrayal of the national interest in pursuit of self-interest. And that's a definition that may hit closer to home in the Trump administration.
The dictionary definition of "treason" is "the offense of acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign." The US Constitution defines it even more narrowly: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Beyond unhinged partisan attacks, the target of the Trump team's cries of treason are members of their own administration who have run afoul of the President's wishes or -- even worse -- decided to tell the truth about what they saw in the room where it happened. So Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed former National Security Advisor John Bolton as a "traitor" for the massively unflattering revelations in his book, backed up by contemporaneous notes, perhaps trying to distract from the account that Pompeo passed a note to Bolton describing the President as "so full of shit." Trump called former Attorney General Jeff Sessions a "traitor" after he appropriately recused himself from the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel.
While ignorance is often used as a defense for President Trump, he's shown a clear understanding of the traditional punishment for traitors, getting caught railing against the whistleblower whose complaint unleashed his impeachment, saying "I want to know who's the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that's close to a spy ... You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now."
That's a clear reference to execution. If that sounds like an overstatement listen to what the former chief speechwriter for Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Guy Snodgrass, told Brian Stelter on Reliable Sources. He heard Trump go on a 10 minute tirade against a Washington Post reporter that Trump said "should be thrown in jail" and ultimately said 'You know, in the good old days, if you had a traitor, you know what you would do? You would just line them up in the street and have them shot.'" "That kind of language," Snodgrass concluded with severe understatement, "is not something you want to hear your commander in chief saying about freedom of the press, about members of the press who are seeking to inform the American pub
