(CNN)As he has actually boasted, President Donald Trump has the very best words– so great they are beyond meaning.On Monday, he said that Democrats who didn’t applaud throughout his State of the Union address were potentially devoting”treason.”He said, with a shrug: “Can we call that treason? Why not? “because “they certainly didn’t appear to enjoy our nation really much.”Obviously, the meaning of “treason”
is not lack of love for one’s nation, but the act of seeking to undermine and betray it. And never mind that it’s not the nation that Democrats refused to praise, however its present deficient leader. In Trump’s world, he’s the most unique man-boy in America, deserving of all the applause just for revealing up. Trump’s press secretary Sarah Sanders stated later that
Trump was just, you understand, goofing around– “clearly joking,”she stated– when he openly, before the video cameras, called sitting members of Congress treasonous. Here’s something that would be possibly treasonous: colluding with a foreign
power to win an election. Whether the Trump project was involved in such collusion throughout the 2016 presidential election is among the subjects special counsel Robert Mueller is exploring. How the GOP reacted to Obama’s SOTU speeches Consider this bizarre little news: according to a report in The New York Times on Monday, Trump’s lawyers are reportedly attempting&to keep him from consulting with Mueller. They are obviously¬ just stressed that Trump might incriminate himself by confessing something he’s really done wrong, however that he might simply lie to private investigators– play quickly and loose with words and truth, as he does so reflexively– and land himself in serious difficulty. Part of what makes a democracy function is trust– in our institutions and in our leaders– and a belief that our institutions will fill out the spaces where leaders show an absence. Trump has actually overthrown that trust, working to gut the administrative stat e, weakening international confidence in American power and stability, and wearing away American self-confidence in law enforcement, the judiciary and the value of American democracy. Leaders overseas do not know when they can think what he says; how can anyone work out with a President like that? Americans at house have learned, like Pavlov’s canines, to satisfy his lies and wild accusations
with a shrug(and a growing sense of fear, if they’re liberals)or with enthusiastic salivation (if they’re members of Trump’s reactionary base). It does not matter whether Trump is purposefully deceiving, cognitively impaired, or simply has actually never suffered effects from his stated fallacies therefore does not care enough to trouble with truth;
an American president who can not be taken at his word is a risk to the world. Toobin: Bannon had a genuine’ax to grind’ Declining to applaud an idea you disagree with is among the most fundamental expressions of complimentary speech, itself a fundamental American worth, right there in the extremely first amendment to our Constitution.
Trump certainly utilized his freedom of speech
(and liberty of Twitter) to criticize his predecessor, President Barack Obama. Trump, in reality, duplicated a series of vicious lies about him, consisting of that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
(Can you imagine Obama responding like the thin-skinned Trump to a cool partisan reception at the State of the Union?)Trump’s untruths and unhinged remarks are so ubiquitous that just the really insane ones break through the media noise. What an unfortunate state we’re all in, when we have actually accepted this as normal from our leader– and when, worst of all, Republicans
go right together with the madness and the lies, patting our little boy President on the head and informing him he’s doing an excellent job, that his words are the very best words, that he doesn’t need to do big young boy things like take responsibility for his actions rather yet. That he is worthy of a prize just for getting involved at all. November 2020 is better each day, and unlike our President, election outcomes don’t lie.