Bipartisan overture gives way to ‘treason’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s call in the State of the Union address last week for a new era of bipartisan cooperation seems like a distant memory.

Now, he’s calling Democrats “un-American” and perhaps “treasonous” for not clapping during that address — part of a larger trend of recent insults and slights as the president turns his ire on the opposition party for failing to go along with his plans.

During Trump’s visit to a suburban Cincinnati manufacturer Monday, he said Democrats’ lack of applause when he referred in his State of the Union address to historically low unemployment rates among blacks and Hispanics showed “they were like death, and un-American, un-American. Somebody said treasonous. Yeah, I guess, why not. Can we call that treasonous? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

The president said that “means they would rather see Trump do badly, OK, than our country do well.”

But his treason quip triggered an uproar among Democrats and even Republican Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Jeff Flake of Arizona. The White House quickly responded that the president was joking, although Trump hasn’t said — or tweeted — as much.

Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a double amputee veteran of the Iraq War, tweeted her umbrage, working in a reminder that Trump had deferments during the Vietnam War for bone spurs.

“We don’t live in a dictatorship or a monarchy,” she wrote. “I swore an oath — in the military and in the Senate — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap.”

Portman, who attended Monday’s event, said he “would not have used the words” that Trump did. But