How many Benedict Arnolds can one administration hold?
“This is treason,” Trump informed his then-economic adviser, Gary Cohn, when Cohn attempted to resign after Trump’s nice words for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, according to Woodward’s book.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, likewise, was pronounced a “traitor” by Trump for recusing himself from the Russia investigation.
.. News he doesn’t like is “fake.”
Actions he doesn’t like are “illegal.”
People he doesn’t like are “traitors.”
Trump says the famed journalist and author should be disbelieved because “I don’t talk the way I am quoted.” But Woodward’s Trump sounds exactly like the Trump we hear daily.
.. Trump suggested that the so-called surveillance of his campaign was “treasonous.” On June 23, he told Mike Huckabee that coverage of his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was “almost treasonous.” On Feb. 5, after congressional Democrats’ failed to applaud for him at the State of the Union, he said: “Can we call that treason? Why not?”
.. On Jan. 11, he told the Wall Street Journal that FBI agent Peter Strzok’s text messages to his mistress were “a treasonous act.” He has also embraced the view that Hillary Clinton, leakers and Republicans who didn’t support him in the 2016 election were traitors.
.. In Woodward’s account, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader,” Cohn described him as a “professional liar,” then-lawyer John Dowd told the president that he was “not really capable” of answering a prosecutor’s questions, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly called him an “idiot.”