Treason for Me But Not for Thee?

Ever since excerpts of John Bolton’s Trump administration memoir began appearing in the press, there’s been a thread of commentary pointing out that we now have even more evidence showing that the president committed treason against the United States — if treason is understood to be a betrayal of the national interest in favor of personal gain.  Among others, John Stoehr at The Editorial Board has elaborated on this charge against the president in light of the Bolton revelations, tying Trump’s behavior to a theory about the GOP’s broader decision over the past several years to switch from loyalty to a United States that we all live in, to a smaller, fictional United States basically encompassing its white citizenry.  I don’t think Stoehr’s theory is wrong.

I am, though, intrigued by the rhetorical question that Stoehr ends with — why don’t more people actually just call Trump’s treason what it is?  Stoehr’s discussion of where the GOP’s real loyalty lies lends itself to a decent explanation for why Republicans won’t ever call him out for treason; so long as the president is acting in a way that advances his re-election interests, even at the expense of American interests, he can’t commit treason because he’s actually showing his loyalty to a higher power — no, not to God, but to the white nation within a nation that is the Republican Party’s home country.  

The more vexing question is why Democrats and the left have been reluctant to call out the president for his betrayal of the nation in the harshest possible terms, by labeling him a traitor to the country.  The first explanation that occurs to me is a fairly tautological one: they’ve chose not to do so because they didn’t see much political gain in doing so.  But why would they think this?  It has something to do with perceptions of “treason” being an accusation that’s extreme, overblown, bombastic — not just because it’s emotionally overboard, but because it gets at notions of the nation and citizenship in which a person can be considered as no longer a legitimate part of the political community.  In a benign sense, this goes against the liberal grain, and could even be said to hint of fascism, akin to President Trump calling the media “the enemy of the people” — a use of emotion and rhetoric to cast certain people as beyond the true community of patriots.  

I would speculate that this reflexive reluctance to use the term “treason” is also tied to the left being far more used to being on the receiving end of such accusations; from socialist labor organizers to Vietnam War protestors, “treason” and “traitor” have been terms that the right has used to try to delegitimize the left at various times.  This may have made the left collectively reluctant to use something that was obviously a slur and a fiction in the past.  On top of this, some may perceive “treason” to have been drained of meaning and power by the right’s long abuse of the term.

I actually think these are all very strong reasons to be cautious about using the terms “traitor” and “treason.”  However, this caution becomes debilitating when it actively prevents us from accurately describing reality.  If any president ever deserved to be called a traitor, and labeled as someone who has committed treason, it is Donald Trump.  As his impeachment made clear, he subverted American national security by undermining Ukraine’s defense against Russia in the interests of his re-election campaign, by making vital aid to the former contingent on that country manufacturing dirt about his then-likely opponent in the 2020 election, Joe Biden. Prior to that, he encouraged Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on his behalf, then acted repeatedly to excuse Russia’s actions and block U.S. efforts to hold that country accountable.

I really don’t know if overcoming the taboo against calling Donald Trump a traitor would actually do much damage to the president or help the Democrats; but it does feel increasingly peculiar to shy away from language that might hammer home the full horror and betrayal of his actions.  It’s also frustrating in light of his claims to be a nationalist and a patriot; his treason blows up those claims, and reveals that what he’s actually claiming to be is a white nationalist, and a patriot only for the cause of Trump.  I keep thinking that there’s got to be a way to make this case better without falling into the outsider/insider slur of right-wing politics. I also can’t help noticing how the concepts of treason and being a traitor have become central elements in the renewed push to remove monuments to the Confederacy and rid our public spaces of the Confederate flag. In that effort, treason has ended up as something of a trump card, an accurate and damning description of what rebel soldiers engaged in and why they should never be celebrated in this country.