The Uses of ‘Treason’ - Columbia Journalism Review
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Saul Loeb/Pool via AP, File
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On May 15, as Donald Trump and his entourage flew back to the United States from a state visit to China, the president ambled to the back of Air Force One for a gaggle with the traveling press corps. David E. Sanger—the New York Times’ White House and national security correspondent—stood face to face with Trump, his phone stretched up to just below the president’s mouth, appearing to record his words. Sanger asked about the war with Iran. “What would the use be of repeating the bombing? You did it for thirty-eight days, and you did not get the political changes in Iran—” Trump jumped in: “No, I got, I had a total military victory,” he said, touting his administration’s supposed successes. Then he leaped into a tirade against the press. “I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write,” Trump concluded. “And you should know better, David. You know better. Your editors tell you what to write, and you write it, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I actually think it’s treason.”
Over the past decade, Trump has repeatedly suggested that people he views as his adversaries—journalists, politicians in Congress and the White House, federal bureaucrats, and activists, to name a few—are traitors to the nation. Trump has always had a hard time distinguishing between the national interest and his own whims, so it’s perhaps no big shock that he routinely confuses dissent with treason. But these pronouncements have seemed increasingly common lately. Last fall, after a group of Democratic lawmakers posted a video reminding military servicepeople that they can refuse illegal orders, Trump accused them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” (The administration’s attempt to bring a federal indictment against the lawmakers failed, and was eventually abandoned.) In March, the White House, in an official release, accused CNN of trying to “undermine our decisive victories” in the US-Israeli war on Iran, and Trump posted on Truth Social that some outlets “should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Last month, he lashed out at the Times again—for an analysis that explored how the decision to wage the war had changed very little geopolitically—alleging “TREASONOUS” stories and warning: “I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!” Trump has written or reshared social media posts featuring the word “treason” more than fifty times since 2016, according to Roll Call. These comments are often erroneous, legally incoherent, or delivered in clumsy asides during speeches, but they tend to be united by a sense of rage at anyone appearing to undermine Trump’s personal authority. “There is no more serious charge a commander in chief can make against an independent news organization,” A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, wrote after Trump called the paper treasonous during his first term. As Margaret Sullivan put it in The Guardian recently, this is “the language and the strategy of authoritarian states.”
To point out the obvious, none of the things Trump has described as such come close to amounting to treason. To prevent abuse by a would-be despot, the framers of the Constitution sketched a very narrow definition of the term—which is the only crime explicitly defined in the document—as levying war against the United States, “or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” But that does not make Trump’s constant drumbeat of accusations something we should normalize or ignore. One of Trump’s goals, as some observers have noted, is to bully, threaten, and shame news organizations with enough ferocity that they soften their scrutiny. (In some cases this appears to have worked; CBS News and its parent company, Paramount Skydance, have sought to curry favor with the Trump administration.) The cries of treason are also part of Trump’s long-standing push to delegitimize the independent press. “You know why I do it?”—insult the press, that is—“I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump reportedly said in 2016 to Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes correspondent, according to her telling. And then, of course, there is Trump’s tendency to bruise easily from bad publicity, stretching back to his days as a real estate developer and tabloid darling in the eighties.
Yet Trump’s claims of treason, to me, stem from a more sinister impulse—and represent more serious offenses—than his day-to-day abuse. Accusing an opponent of this highest of crimes, or smearing them as a traitor, is an attempt to enforce a particular vision of political belonging. By deploying these terms, a...