Treason.
I’ve been wondering about it for quite a while, off and on. A few days ago, I dropped the word into a conversation I was having with my brother and our cousin Nancy. I wasn’t affecting sensation. Just wondering about it. That’s all I was doing.
Is the Department of Justice investigation considering charging Trump with treason? However deeply the investigators must be digging into the facts, and whatever deep, dark facts they’ve uncovered — beyond the shallow, overlit ones we all witnessed ourselves — the thing is, Trump has been so, so stupid and obvious in his actions and words, there’s a sense of near-incredulity when the word treason pops up in the mind.
“No, no,” we say to ourselves. “Just because he’s actually performed treasonous acts right in front of us, it couldn’t actually be treason. Could it?”
“Wondering” is a good word here. I’m applying it to Jack Smith’s DOJ group, wondering not if they’re considering treason — they must be; they are governed by the laws of the United States — but whether any of the top people look at evidence even beyond what we’ve seen with our eyes, and have said to each other in a sealed conference room, “What the fuck? And what can we, should we, must we do with this?”
I read quite a lot of the Mueller Report so would not be shocked to learn, say, that Trump was getting not only financial help from Putin, but direct advice, in the category of How To Neatly Transform Yourself From An Average Demagogue Into An Absolute Ruler. Like Me. In turn, I’d think Trump was passing along all sorts of U.S. secrets, and promising Putin even more.
Treason, geez. It’s a cyclone of a word.
I’m not going to list the most egregious instances of Trump’s potentially treasonous behavior. You all know them and possibly are doing with them the same thing I am: saying to yourself, “It couldn’t actually be treason, could it?”
Could be.