Last post
Next post
Last night I sent in next week’s column for the Duluth Reader. Late in the afternoon I emailed the editor and explained I wouldn’t be sending in a column. I had roughed out several possible columns in previous days but I was consumed with the news of Trump’s humiliation of his White House visitor the Ukrainian leader Zelensky. I was too distracted to pursue the sketchy work from earlier in the week. Then after putting a frozen dinner in my oven at 5:30 after my wife began showing symptoms from Covid which is now raging at our daughter’s house. I told Claudia I had to write a column…..after announcing a little before I wasn’t in the mood.
I went upstairs to rattle off a column, got a rough draft done and then went downstairs after what I thought had been the 25 minutes necessary for the first heating of the dinner in the over. I came down fifty minutes later with a rough draft and saw that my wife had finished her dinner. PBS newshour was about to begin. I really wanted to watch their Brooks and Capehart discussion. Brooks made me proud. He describe the shame he felt watching Vance and Trump humiliate a victim of invasion. Here! Hear!
I returned to polish off a few rough paragraphs. This is how my column began:
“The American voters have the absolute right to elect a traitor for president of the United States. In 2024 that is exactly what they did. Donald Trump evaded the courts and jail time but only an imbecile, a poutin (that’s French for whore) or Federalist Society lawyer wishing to stay in his good graces would say otherwise.”
I’ve been giving this some thought this morning. I had two books in mind about traitors.

I will stand my my assertion that Trump is a traitor as firmly as President Thomas Jefferson stood by his conviction that his vice president Aaron Burr was a traitor and made sure he stood trial on that charge……something Donald Trump will probably never face. I’ll be back before the day is out to make that case.
Betrayal of a country is the basic definition of traitor. By that token I’d say Ed Snowden is a traitor to the United States. He was Tulsi Gabbards hero before the Republican cows OKed her to be in charge of National Security. Republican’s in Lincoln’s era considered the Southern rebels traitors. Like the southern rebels Donald Trump didn’t like the results of the 2020 election and prepared as he had in 2016 when he expected to lose the election by saying the only way he could lose was if Hillary Clinton’s side cheated. That was his face saving card to play when he lost. The only time I saw him thunderstruck was the night he was declared the victor after all his advisors warned him he would lose and he was prepared to charge around on stage screaming unfair like her screamed “birther” shit about son of Kansas and Hawaii Barack Obama being foreign born. And then he didn’t need to play that card………until six months before his reelection when he refused to say he’d step down if he lost…..as the polls suggested once again would happen. When the polls came true we saw how months of preparation to call foul played out on January 6th the day every single Congressman was prepared to declare Biden the winner.
January sixth resulted in a thousand jail sentences for crimes just short of treason.
So, the man who conspired to steal the election three times is an obvious traitor. His supporters who believe what he said can generously be called deluded. The supporters, like our congressman Pete Stauber, who know good and well he lost and who suggested as much for ten minutes after the sixes came after him threatening to hang Vice President Pence are as good as traitors too.
But I’ll add a couple more thoughts. The book on the left goes back to when South Africa was a white controlled anti-democracy. It was written to considerable acclaim by a white author. I bought the book but have never cracked it open. I mention it for two reasons. Elon Musk the white illegal alien multi-billionaire is from South Africa. He has no doubt put a bug in Trumps ear so that he has accused the black run government that now runs the nation to have stolen land from the previous white owners. Maybe it was stollen back from whites who stole it from black Africans. But only a small fraction was stolen back because a lot of whites have been grandfathered in and kept their property. Trump who led lynch parties against black americans likes claiming black people are bad actors. I have heard the audio recording of Born a Crime written by and read by Trevor Noah which I highly recommend. Its both funny as hell and wrenching.
But before Whites stepped aside the author of My Traitor’s Heart wrote of his traitorous opposition to the white dictatorship. His traitor’s heart did not belong to a traitor who betrayed his country. It was opposed to the anti-democratic white minority rule.
The other book is one I read in 1996, long before it was in fashion to write about Aaron Burr. He was Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President because Alexander Hamilton who detested Jefferson at least considered him an honest man compared to Burr. Those of you who saw the musical Alexander Hamilton know Burr shot and killed Hamilton in a duel. Burr was a Donald Trump type and Jefferson put him on trial for treason for organizing an attempted breakaway of American states and provinces. I didn’t think I got much out of that book but looking at it today it was full of yellow marker lines. Rereading one mentioned the ironic fact that Burr the future traitor quit working for Benedict Arnold in the Revolutionary War because he was one of the few patriots who detested Arnold. And Arnold is still the exemplar for American treachery today and Aaron Burr who conspired to break America up didn’t like him.
