Yes, he has betrayed the country
by digby
This piece by William Saletan at Slate is very intriguing and not just because it shows that Trump is traitorous but because it requires nothing more than accepting what we can see with our own eyes:
To escape the Cohen and Manafort stories, Trump is retreating into the Russia mystery. He can’t be impeached, the theory goes, because he hasn’t been caught betraying his country. But he has. Trump has bent over backward to defend Vladimir Putin at America’s expense, and the question is why. Journalists have explored the worst possibilities: Trump is a Russian agent, Trump conspired with Putin to tip the 2016 election, Putin is blackmailing Trump with a raunchy sex tape.
In this article, I’m going to take the opposite approach. I’ll assume none of that speculation is true. I’ll stick to the public record. I’ll set aside the question of collusion as most people understand it—a conspiracy during the election—and I won’t postulate any hidden motives. I’ll present the minimum we know about Trump and Russia. The minimum is enough to merit impeachment: Trump is working with Putin to protect Russia and cripple the United States.
This conclusion doesn’t require any wild theories about kompromat or dual loyalty. Everything Trump has done can be explained by traits and motives he displays every day: narcissism, insecurity, ruthlessness, and spite. He enjoys the celebrity of meeting with well-armed dictators. He’s obtuse to moral distinctions between regimes or systems of government. He sees no difference between the national interest and his personal interests, or between getting campaign help from Americans and getting it from a foreign power. And he’s obsessed with domestic enemies. He’s far more interested in using Putin to pummel Democrats than in working with Democrats to confront Putin.
These ingredients have been sufficient to turn Trump, in effect, against his own country. Putin didn’t need to collude with him. All Putin had to do was praise Trump, signal his support for Trump in the election, offer him a prestigious geopolitical relationship, and come to his defense when U.S. intelligence agencies accused Russia of helping Trump win. That put the intelligence agencies on the wrong side of Trump, and it put Putin on the right side. And that’s how we ended up where we are today: with a president who defends Putin’s crimes and persecutes former U.S. officials who exposed those crimes.
Maybe you’re skeptical that Trump’s behavior can be explained without kompromat. Or maybe, in the absence of proof of collusion, you think it’s unfair to accuse him of betraying his country. But come along, and I’ll show you how both can be true.
He lays it all out in several sections entitled:
The Courtship
Tests of Loyalty
The War at Home
The Turn Against Intelligence
Attacking the Investigation
Embracing Putin
Denouncing America
The Crisis Will Never End
Saletan makes a compelling case that Trump has consciously adopted the Putin line and for a variety of reasons, mostly attributable to the fact that he is a deranged, unfit imbecile and Vladimir Putin is playing him like a fiddle. It's right there before our eyes.
None of this precludes the possibility that Putin has something on Trump or that he did all this for pecuniary reasons. It's entirely possible. But just on the basis of what we already know, out in the open, we know that it's entirely possible that the president of the United States has taken the side of a foreign adversary against his own government purely out of stupidity, stubbornness and spite. It seems to me that nothing could be more impeachable than that.
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