Times columnist Paul Krugman has been peppering his screeds with treason references for years. But instead of simply assailing the president, he prefers to accuse tens of millions of other Americans of being willing to sell out their country.
In a 2017 Times blog post entitled, “The New Climate of Treason,” Krugman wrote that “essentially the whole GOP turns out to be OK with the moral equivalent of treason if it benefits their side in domestic politics.”45
In another piece that year the Times fixture wrote that his partisan opponents appeared to be willing to betray their country not just for power, but for money as well. In “Judas, Tax Cuts and the Great Betrayal,” Krugman wrote that “almost an entire party appears to have decided that potential treason in the cause of tax cuts for the wealthy is no vice.”46 Perhaps realizing how dishonest and mean-spirited his comment would appear to a reasonable person, Krugman added that he was just barely exaggerating.
We never bought the collusion story advanced by the Comey FBI. In a Fox Business interview in April of 2017, one of us asked President Trump if he had made a mistake in not asking Comey to step down at the very start of the administration and whether it was too late to fire him. The president said it was “not too late” but added, “I want to give everybody a good fair chance.”47 The record shows that Comey had already had more than enough chances to conduct fair and honest investigations. By the next month Trump’s patience was exhausted and Comey was fired.
For almost the next two years, as Robert Mueller was engaged in his fruitless search for collusion evidence, much of the press corps continued making outrageous and empty accusations about the president. We focused on the facts. Week after week on Sunday Morning Futures on the Fox News Channel and Mornings with Maria on the Fox Business Network, viewers heard directly from members of Congress who had received classified briefings, questioned witnesses, and examined the relevant evidence. Viewers also heard from Americans like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos who had been targeted by Comey’s FBI. The programs reported numerous important details about the campaign against Trump and the most important was that there was no evidence of collusion. Reporting this fact earned nothing but scorn from many people in our industry, who, sadly, had adopted Rutenberg’s view that the traditional standards of journalism should no longer apply.
Speaking of the New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman didn’t just enjoy hurling treason allegations at the president but insisted on including all kinds of other vicious and unfounded accusations about Trump and his voters:
For more than a generation, the Republican establishment was able to keep this bait-and-switch under control: racism was deployed to win elections, then was muted afterwards, partly to preserve plausible deniability, partly to focus on the real priority of enriching the one percent. But with Trump they lost control: the base wanted someone who was blatantly racist and wouldn’t pretend to be anything else. And that’s what they got, with corruption, incompetence, and treason on the side.48
Treason on the side. Krugman has so thoroughly convinced himself of the wickedness of people who disagree with him that he asserts that one of America’s two main political parties “will do anything, even betray the nation, in its pursuit of partisan advantage.”
“Trump, Treasonous Traitor” was the headline on a Times column by Charles M. Blow in July 2018. Blow wrote:
Put aside whatever suspicions you may have about whether Donald Trump will be directly implicated in the Russia investigation.
Trump is right now, before our eyes and those of the world, committing an unbelievable and unforgivable crime against this country. It is his failure to defend.49
The astounding argument was that even if the Russia collusion conspiracy theory fell apart—as it did eight months later with the completion of the Mueller report—it was still reasonable to accuse Trump of treason because his administration was insufficiently tough on Russia, in the estimation of Charles M. Blow. With sledgehammer subtlety, the Times columnist added that “America is being betrayed by its own president” and reiterated that “Trump is a traitor.”50
The media’s collusion party was profitable and fun while it lasted, but all bad things must come to an end. Even Robert Mueller’s team of anti-Trump prosecutors formally admitted there was no collusion evidence in the spring of 2019, triggering a season of sinking ratings in cable news. Even historically strong viewing for a two-night Democratic presidential debate in June couldn’t save MSNBC from a stinker of a second quarter that year.51
Business picked up toward the end of 2019 when Representative Adam Schiff led Democrats in a partisan effort to impeach the president without alleging any crime. No House Republicans voted to impeach and a couple Democrats voted against the misguided prosecution, but the case moved to the Senate, where the president was acquitted.
Before the case failed in the Senate, it revealed the lengths some media folk would go in attempting to drive Trump from office. Democrats argued that Trump had abused his office by suggesting to the president of Ukraine that his government examine a lucrative board seat Joe Biden’s son Hunter had received from a Ukrainian energy company while the elder Biden was vice president and overseeing Ukraine policy. Hunter Biden had no particular expertise in Ukraine or the energy business. What’s more, Joe Biden had withheld aid from the country until the Ukrainian government forced the firing of a local prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden’s business associates. The Ukraine gig was similar to other deals the younger Biden had struck in China and Romania while his father was vice president and leading U.S. policy in those countries—lucrative arrangements for which Hunter Biden was manifestly unqualified.
The basic problem for Democrats was that they were arguing it was an impeachable offense for Trump to suggest an investigation of conduct that any reasonable person would agree ought to be investigated. So, in the months leading
