David Rothkopf - Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump

Though those that are betrayd do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor stands in worse case of woe.

William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

The president of the United States is a traitor.

He is a liar. He is a fraud. He is a racist. He is a misogynist. He is incompetent. He is corrupt. He is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds.

But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the United States has had and, indeed, from every other senior official of the U.S. government in over twenty-four decades of history, is that he has repeatedly, indisputably, and egregiously betrayed his country.

How that will be defined and litigated by prosecutors and by the Congress of the United States is a work in progress. Cases revealing the instances of his placing foreign interests before those of the United States, always ultimately to serve his own greed or personal ambition, will likely be surfacing for years to come. So may, too, the abuses of power or negligence that contributed to exacerbating the consequences of the worst public health crisis suffered by the U.S. in a century. But for historians and for students of facts that are already available to the public, there is no question Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous. As his presidency has progressed, other scandals have manifested themselves, so many that they have blended together to sometimes obscure this core truth. But it has remained, and day to day his actions have manifested his willingness to serve any country that might help him personally whether that country was the one he was elected to lead or not.

At its core, that definition depends on breaking faith with the people of the country he was chosen to lead. But the story of his betrayals began long before he took office and then continued and was compounded by his actions as president. While we may not yet have uncovered many of his crimes, the story we know so far is so outrageous and disturbing that it raises, and I believe answers, a question that has never before been presented in American history: Has Americas forty-fifth president been the greatest threat this country has faced during his tenure in office?

In 2016, during the presidential campaign ultimately won by Trump by the thinnest of margins and with the aid of Vladimir Putin and the intelligence services of the Russian Federation, I was serving as the editor of Foreign Policy magazine. At that time, knowing of the ties of Trump and the team around him to the Russians, his solicitation of Russian aid, his embrace of Russian positions, his propensity for corruption, his repeated lies and deceptions about his links to Russia, and his deeply flawed character, my colleagues and I made a decision unprecedented in the almost half-century-long history of the magazine. We wrote an editorial urging against the election of Trump and asserting that the risk his elevation to the presidency would pose would be grave.

We were not alone. The warning signs were there. More than that, he had not only made public his embrace of Russian assistance with his objective of defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton, but we knew that the Russians were using active measures to attack the United States. (In fact, we at Foreign Policy had been among those attacked by Fancy Bear, the Russian hackers later demonstrated by Robert Muellers team to be part of a Russian military-intelligence-team effort to hack not only the Democratic National CommitteeDNCbut a number of sites they felt might be influential in the United States, including, in addition to Foreign Policy, the Council on Foreign Relations and others.) It was known that Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign chairman, had shady ties to Russian oligarchs, including some very close to Vladimir Putin, and we had seen as Manafort and Trumps team had altered the GOP platform to take a more Russia-friendly stance on Ukraine despite Russias serial violations of international laws and norms in its attacks on that country and its seizure of Crimea.

In other words, these were not just political dirty tricks that Trump was engaged in. This was collaboration with one of Americas most determined adversaries, the one country in the world that had more nuclear weapons than the United States.

Of course, since Trump took office, the scope and scale of his cooperation with the Russians and their consequences came into clearer focus, and campaign crimes were compounded by crimes committed to obstruct justice to protect not just Trump and his team but the Russians, too. In fact, throughout Trumps first term of office, he has repeatedly undertaken actions that protect Russia and Russians, advanced their interests, and thwarted the efforts of the U.S. intelligence, law-enforcement, diplomatic, and military communities as they sought to stop or counteract Russian wrongdoing. He has also sought the involvement of other governments in helping to serve his personal objectives, from Ukraine to China, placing personal interests above national interests, another form of grave betrayal. And, as of this writing, despite the multiple investigations into the presidents activities and the serial revelations of his misdeeds and a formal congressional impeachment investigation, Donald Trump shows no signs of reversing or even moderating these efforts. Indeed, as the Ukraine and China instances reveal, he entered into his campaign for reelection as he did his first campaignsoliciting aid from foreign powers to help him win power at home and offering to them the benefits of his holding that office. This approach echoes the Trump first ideology at the core of all he does. See, for example, how he denied or delayed federal assistance during the coronavirus outbreak to states whose governors he saw as being critical or even not fully appreciative of his efforts. That, too, was a betrayal of his duty to his country.)

Even after the Mueller investigation into his 2016 ties with the Russians and the Trump impeachment hearings which centered around his abuse of power in shaking down the Ukrainian government in order to advance his personal political interests, much remains to be revealed by the investigations into the presidents involvement in and support of attacks against the United States, investigations that might not even be fully possible until he is out of office and those who are actively protecting him, from his attorney general to the Senate majority leader, are out of power or substantially weakened. But as of now, it is already clear that Russias interference in our election and Russias support of Trump has advanced major Russian objectives, including but not limited to unprecedented efforts by the U.S. president to weaken NATO and attack NATO allies; support for Russian positions in Syria; undercutting the standing of the United States in the world; fostering deep divisions within the United States; enabling further Russian cyber interventions in the United States; covering up past such interventions; embracing Russian leaders and representatives; supporting Russian efforts in Europe to promote right-wing nationalists who seek to undermine the European Union (EU); undoing sanctions against key Russian leaders, including those associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and slow-walking other such sanctions or benefits to Russian rivals. Further, these goals have not just been achieved, they have been advanced by the president working in conjunction with a political party, the GOP, which has largely embraced Trumps pro-Russia stance as its own and which is complicit with the president and the Russians in advancing the goals mentioned.