For nearly all of American history, the idea of a sitting president accusing anyone of “treason” would’ve been recognized as a dramatic and significant development. Treason, after all, is a capital offense, involving a criminal betrayal of the nation.
Treason is also unique as the only crime expressly defined by the Constitution — so it’s not an accusation to be thrown around casually, especially not by the person in the nation’s highest office.
Someone probably ought to let Donald Trump know. Media Matters noted:
President Donald Trump, in a Truth Social post published shortly before midnight on Tuesday, declared reporters at news outlets that produce reporting critical of his administration as “treasonous.” […]
The post marked at least the third time this month, and the ninth time since March, that Trump had accused news outlets of “treasonous” reporting, according to a Media Matters review of his statements on social media and transcripts of his public events compiled by Roll Call’s Factba.se. The president also said news outlets had nearly or almost committed treason on four additional occasions during his second term, though since May he has transitioned to making outright accusations.
In case it’s not obvious, none of the president’s journalistic targets (a list that included MS NOW, my employer) has committed any such crime. And therein lies the point: Trump routinely accuses people he doesn’t like of “treason” with an alarming frequency and without any real regard for the word’s meaning.
By way of social media, the Republican has referenced “treason” (and related words like “treasonists” and “treasonous”) more than 200 times so far this year, and while journalists have been his most frequent target, the president has recently applied the label to everyone from critics of artificial intelligence to Democratic Senate candidate Alexander Vindman to the organization that filed a legal challenge against his White House ballroom vanity project.
The rhetoric didn’t generate a ton of headlines, probably because it’s become so routine to hear Trump throw the word around. Looking back through the MaddowBlog archive, I came across instances in which he used the word “treason” to attack Barack Obama, Democratic critics of the war in Iran, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and former FBI Director James Comey. He has also eyed treason investigations into Sen. Adam Schiff, The New York Times, Google and federal law enforcement officials.
At one point, after one of his first-term State of the Union addresses, Trump even suggested that congressional Democrats might have committed “treason” because they failed to applaud to his satisfaction.
In 2023, he declared his belief that members of the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee “should be tried for Fraud and Treason.” A year later, the Republican amplified a social media message that accused former House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney of being “guilty” of “treason.”
You’ve heard of the boy who cried “wolf”? I’d like to introduce you to the president who cried “treason.”
Trump has never explicitly said what, exactly, he thinks the word means, but the common thread that ties together all of these examples is his apparent belief that any kind of opposition or steps he perceives as antithetical to the nation’s interests would qualify as treason.
That’s bonkers, though it’s also consistent with a twisted “L’État, c’est moi” worldview that he’s embraced with unnerving frequency.
It’s not at all healthy when an authoritarian president falsely, casually and frequently accuses various people and institutions of treason, effectively making this the background noise of our civic lives. And yet, here we are.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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