TRAITOR

Rothkopf ranges across American history for confirming examples that hold Donald Trump guilty of treason.

In his new book, On Treason, Carlton F.W. Larson, a California law professor, discusses how the crime of treason is bound up in such specific technicalities that it is almost never prosecuted as such. Rothkopf takes a less confining view here, holding that Trump “has repeatedly, indisputably, and egregiously betrayed his country.” He has done this through many acts of commission, though the author hits hardest on the Mueller Report’s assertions of actions that favored other countries—especially Russia—over the one Trump ostensibly leads. A president who is a traitor is a highly unusual situation. But as Rothkopf observes, there have been many other Americans who, motivated by money or ideology, have aided the nation’s enemies. The most notorious of them is Benedict Arnold, whose very name is a byword for treason and who attempted to trade away military secrets that might have led to the failure of the American revolutionary cause. Aaron Burr appealed to the British for help in trying to realize his ambitions to power, though they were lukewarm to the idea, and, writes the author, “there is no evidence they sought to break up the United States.” John Brown was executed for treason against the state of Virginia, though the charge would not be entertained today. And so forth, on down to the Rosenbergs—who, unfortunately for them, fell afoul of Roy Cohn, later to become Trump’s mentor and “often cited as precisely the kind of lawyer Trump was looking for when he appointed William Barr to be U.S. attorney general, a position Trump saw as primarily existing to protect him from his accusers.” There are many questions that lawyers need to ask Trump that concern his disdain for American institutions and fondness for foreign dictators, but Rothkopf’s conclusions are open-ended.

The argument doesn’t cinch the charge, but the book makes for a useful summation of ceaseless and blatant malfeasance.