DAY TRAITOR
As Dow takes record nosedive, hypocritical Trump says not clapping for him is ‘treason’
President Trump, at Ohio rally Monday, whined that lack of applause at the State of the Union address amounted to “treason.” Meanwhile, in the real world, the Dow Jones plunged 1,175 points.
PRESIDENT TRUMP on Monday accused congressional Democrats of “treason” and being Unamerican for failing to clap during his State of the Union address last week.
“Can we call that treason? Why not,” Trump said.
Trump, who at times led his own applause during the State of the Union, told a crowd at an Ohio manufacturing plant that lawmakers were being unpatriotic by refusing to give him his due.
“You know they play games,” Trump said during a suburban Cincinnati speech on tax reform, recalling how coolly his address was received .
He said he had to stop looking at the Democrats during his address — which had included calls for bipartisan unity — because they were giving off “bad energy.”
“They would rather see Trump do badly, OK, than our country do well,” Trump said. “It got to the point that I didn’t really want to look too much on that side. It was bad energy.”
“You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy wild, they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country,” Trump said.
“And you have the other side even on positive news, really positive news like that, they were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much. But you look at that and it’s really very, very sad. So we have to keep it going because this country is turning and it’s turning much faster.”
The remarks — which came with a deadline to keep the government running fast approaching — were surprising because Trump is far from the first President not to have the opposing party fawn over his speech.
Democrats denounced the remarks, and said they were more reminiscent of a strongman than a statesman.
“When Vladimir Putin does his yearly news conference, he generally demands applause and supplication from those in attendance,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper. “But it’s beyond bizarre for an American President to demand the same from free-thinking citizens in a democratic republic.”
The “treason” talk didn’t go over well with at least one constitutional scholar. “If I didn’t feel constrained by the Constitution’s narrow definition of ‘treason,’ I’d say Trump’s idiotic equation of himself with the nation was treasonous in itself,” tweeted Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe. Article III of the Constitution says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Trump was on the receiving end of treason accusations after he revealed highly classified information to Russian diplomats during a White House meeting last year.
The information, later revealed to have come from Israel, involved an ISIS threat about the use of laptop computers on an aircraft.
The administration has also been under investigation for possible links to Russian meddling in the 2016 elections — and Trump has refused to impose congressionally mandated sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Trump had called for unity in the State of the Union address, but had strong words for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who said Trump’s tax cut bill leaves the middle class with “crumbs.”
“Well, she’s a rich woman who lives in a big, beautiful house in California who wants to give all of your money away, and she talked about ‘crumbs,’ ” said the resort-owning President.
Pelosi clapped back on Twitter. “Every American should be alarmed by how @realDonaldTrump is working to make loyalty to him synonymous with loyalty to our country,” Pelosi tweeted. “That is not how democracy works.”