Stop Calling It 'Treason'
Kevin D. Williamson
July 17, 2018 at 5:08 PM
What Trump actually did is bad enough.
There is loose talk of “treason,†and no one expected more from Jimmy Kimmel: He is a comedian and, as he has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, a fool—a reminder that “comedian†and “fool†were at one point near-synonyms in English. But there is no Lear-style wisdom in Kimmel’s dangerous buffoonery, nor in that of Stephen Colbert et al., only the cynical, self-serving histrionics of high-toned bile merchants with time to fill between the Buick commercials.
We might be tempted to expect more of someone working in a purportedly more serious mode, such as Charles Blow of the New York Times, if we had not read much of Charles Blow of the New York Times. Mr. Blow accused Trump of “treasonous†action, as did former CIA director John Brennan. Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe, which still exists, declared: “Trump is a clear and present danger to U.S. national security.â€
The election of Donald J. Trump, bon vivant and game-show host, to the presidency of the United States occasioned a great deal of talk about “normalization.†All the best people instructed us that we were not to “normalize†Trump, that we must treat him instead as an illegitimate outlier. One wonders if those people ever have visited the United States of America, where the Trump style and Trump mentality require no “normalization†at all, being as they are (and long have been) the dominant strain of American pop culture. You might as well argue against the “normalization†of Big Macs, Camaros, and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Barack Obama spent eight years offering himself as the American super-ego, and Americans responded by electing their id. President Trump is as normal as diabetes.
But we ought to be concerned about the normalization of treason claims.
more
https://www.weeklystandard.com/kevin-d-williamson/donald-trumps-meeting-with-vladimir-putin-wasnt-treason
