Why Trump flippantly accusing Democrats of ‘treason’ is not a laughing matter

The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website February 6, 2018:

President Trump on Feb. 5 said Democrats’ refusal to cheer during his State of the Union address amounted to ‘un-American’ behavior. (The Washington Post)

THE BIG IDEA: A president loosely accusing the opposition party of treason represents a greater danger to the long-term health of the American system than a 4.6 percent drop in the Dow Jones industrial average.

President Trump said Monday that it was “un-American” and “treasonous” when some congressional Democrats did not applaud during last week’s State of the Union address as he touted the low rates of black and Hispanic unemployment.

“Even on positive news like that, really positive news like that, they were like death and un-American,” Trump said at a manufacturing plant outside Cincinnati. “Somebody said ‘treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Shall we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

Slipping into the third person, Trump insisted that Democrats “would rather see Trump do badly, ok, than our country do well.”

“It’s very selfish,” he said. “And it got to a point where I didn’t even want to look too much during the speech over to that side. Because, honestly, it was bad energy. … They don’t care about the security of our country. They don’t care about MS-13 killers pouring into our country.”

— Treason, which is punishable by death, is the only crime that is explicitly defined in the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

— This episode is the latest illustration of Trump’s lack of self-discipline. None of the coverage of his speech focuses on him touting tax cuts, which was the stated goal of the jaunt to Ohio. Aides told reporters on Air Force One that this was not going to be a political speech, yet Trump quickly went off script to predict Republican gains in 2018 and rip into Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.

In the very State of the Union address that Trump is so perturbed about, the president declared that he was “extending an open hand to work with members of both parties.” “I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people we were elected to serve,” he said.

Not only do Trump’s remarks in Ohio underscore the hollowness of such bipartisan bromides, they further poison the well. Why would Democrats cooperate or compromise with someone who questions their loyalty to the country?

— While the president was certainly being flip, this wasn’t just idle talk. It appears to be part of a coordinated effort to raise questions about the motives of the opposition. The Republican National Committee pushed out a web advertisement earlier Monday attacking Democrats for not standing during the State of the Union.

— Bigger picture, the president has a pattern of diluting the potency of language. Trump cheapens the value of significant words by overusing and misusing them.

He encouraged violence against protesters as a candidate. He welcomed chants of “lock her up” about Clinton, whom he routinely described as “crooked.” He attacked the intelligence community: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

After the election, he coopted the term “fake news” — which once described a real phenomenon of made-up stories online. Now, by Politico’s count, leaders or state media in at least 15 countries have adopted the president’s denunciation to quell dissent and question human rights violations.

Once in the Oval Office, he tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media … is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” He’s called libel laws a “sham,” mused about delicensing NBC and his lawyers sought to block the publication of the book “Fire and Fury.” He routinely describes himself as the target of a “witch hunt.”

— To be sure, it’s not that Trump and his team do not think words matter. In December, the administration prohibited officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s top public health agency, from using a list of seven words or phrases in official documents being prepared for the budget. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

— After the president accused Democrats of treachery, most elected Republicans stayed tight-lipped last night. The only GOP senator who appears to have spoken out at this point is Jeff Flake of Arizona, who is retiring:

Many Republicans chalk all these quotes up to nothing more than Trump being Trump. They say he was joking. They believe he should be held to a lower standard because he’s not “politically correct” and still new to this.

— But imagine how much the right would have (appropriately) freaked out if Barack Obama accused Joe Wilson of committing “treason” after the South Carolina congressman yelled “you lie” during his 2009 address to a joint session of Congress. 

— Obama used the word “treason” only twice during his eight years in office. Not coincidentally, he was discussing the rise of Trump both times. As the Republican primaries raged on in March 2016 and the establishment tried to block Trump from securing the nomination, Obama said during a fundraiser in Austin that their party wouldn’t be in that position if elected Republicans had not looked the other way for years while Trump falsely accused him of being from Kenya.

“As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. … Now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment,” Obama said. “What’s happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. The reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time: that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts; … that compromise is a betrayal; that the other side isn’t simply wrong … but the other side is destroying the country or treasonous.

“So they can’t be surprised when somebody suddenly looks and says, ‘You know what, I can do that even better! I can make stuff up better than that! I can be more outrageous than that! I can insult people even better than that! I can be even more uncivil,’” Obama continued. “If you don’t care about the facts or the evidence or civility in making your arguments, you will end up with candidates who will say just about anything and do just about anything.”

The next day in Dallas, Obama lamented Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. “We can have political debates without thinking that the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice,” the then-president said. “We can support candidates without treating their opponents as unpatriotic or treasonous or somehow deliberately trying to weaken America.”

— George W. Bush never uttered the word “treason” in public during either term, including in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

— This isn’t the first time Trump has used the T-word as president. Just last month, he accused FBI agent Peter Strzok of treason for sending negative text messages about him during the 2016 election to a lawyer at the FBI who he was having an affair with. “By the way, that’s a treasonous act,” the president told the Wall Street Journal. “What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act.”

— Because of the power of the bully pulpit, this rhetoric is rubbing off on other people who should know better. Presidents set the country’s tone. It’s not just children who listen and mimic them — but also congressmen.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said last Friday, for example, that the memo written by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes showed “clear and convincing evidence of treason” by top law enforcement officials. “The full-throated adoption of this illegal misconduct and abuse of FISA by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein is not just criminal but constitutes treason,” Gosar said in a statementthat called upon Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek “criminal prosecution against these traitors to our nation.”

— Trump accusing Democrats of treason prompted many left-leaning observers to accuse him of the same thing, which pours additional fuel on the fire and contributes to the tribalism that is tearing America apart. “Not clapping for you isn’t treason, but don’t worry, Mr. President, you could find out the exact definition of treason pretty soon,” Stephen Colbert joked during his opening monologue on CBS last night.

President Trump on Feb. 5 praised the GOP tax overhaul and warned Republican voters against “complacency” in the midterm elections. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

— “Trump surely does not imagine putting Democrats on trial for treason. Indeed, if you watch the video, you can see him treat the outrageous accusation in an offhand, why-not-go-there manner,” writes columnist Ruth Marcus. “But even if Trump is not ready to round up his political opponents, it is appalling — it is unthinkable — that a president would use this kind of language to describe dissent. The president does not understand the first thing about the country he was elected to lead, or about the Constitution that he swore to uphold.”

— National Review’s Dan McLaughlin says calling Democrats traitors is “the subversive, somewhat cleansing but ultimately corrosive part of Trump’s brand of political performance art”: “He’s talking to people who by and large think that politicians never mean anything they say, and he’s out there telling them, you’re right. We can say anything we want and none of it matters. It’s all a racket. Hey, how ’bout you and I call each other traitors and then punch the clock at the end of the day and get a drink together? Maybe our political class really has earned being treated this way, but every time Trump does it, he makes it harder to rebuild the broken norms he inherited and has treated with such contempt.”

— “One of the things that has made the Donald Trump political experience so peculiar is that he combines the instincts of an authoritarian with the mannerisms of an insult comic,” writes New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “Neither of these traits is a familiar element of electoral politics in the United States (certainly not at the presidential level). And as strange as they are individually, they are even more bizarre in combination. … It is totally beyond the pale for a president to describe the opposing party as having committed treason for failing to applaud his speech. It is the logic and rhetoric of authoritarianism in its purest form. But if Trump does it in the middle of a Don Rickles — style riff, does that make it better? Worse? Just weirder?”

— But here’s the rub: This really is no laughing matter. Accusing opponents of treason is rare among leaders across the developed world. It’s more typically done by dictators in the Third World. Consider this Reuters dispatch from Nairobi that just posted:

“A Kenyan opposition politician was charged on Tuesday with treason for his involvement in a symbolic presidential ‘swearing in’ of opposition leader Raila Odinga that was a challenge to President Uhuru Kenyatta. The charge sheet presented by police … said Miguna Miguna was being charged with ‘being present and consenting to the administration of an oath to commit a capital offence, namely treason.’ … Miguna had refused to plead to the charges he faced, saying his case had to be heard before a judge … Miguna was arrested on Friday in a dawn raid on his home. … Odinga’s symbolic inauguration last Tuesday in the heart of the capital of East Africa’s wealthiest economy was intended as a direct challenge to Kenyatta. Odinga insists he, not Kenyatta, was the true winner of a disputed presidential election last August. … Three privately owned television stations were shut down last week as they began to cover Odinga’s ‘swearing in.’”

— Social media last night was consumed by Trump’s talk of treason:

The dictionaries weighed in:

Intellectually serious thought leaders are disturbed:

The NBC commentator:

Stanford professor and former U.S. ambassador to Russia:

Foreign policy guru:

Editor at large of the conservative Weekly Standard:

A former speechwriter to George W. Bush:

University of Texas law professor:

An MSNBC host who previously served as a Republican congressman:

A London School of Economics fellow:

Democratic lawmakers took umbrage:

Illinois senator:

The top House Democrat:

Oregon senator:

Hawaii senator:

Virginia senator:

Virginia congressman:

Texas congresswoman:

California congressman:

A Minnesota congressman: