AlterNet: Opinion There's only one thing blocking Trump's treason

[Dennis Donovan]

AlterNet - (archived: https://archive.ph/gSg8X ) Opinion | There's only one thing blocking Trump's treason

Sabrina Haake
May 11, 2025

On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts, in a not-so-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, stressed that the U.S. Constitution’s “main innovation” was the creation of an independent judiciary. Our constitutional system of government only works, he emphasized, if power shared between the three branches of federal government remains equal and balanced, and it is up to the courts, not Trump, to decide what makes it so.

Roberts’ remarks followed the Trump regime’s astonishing flurry of attacks against the judiciary. On April 25, Attorney General Pam Bondi called judges who refused to legitimize Trump’s power grabs “deranged,” then, with characteristic bombast, warned the judiciary, “we will come after you and we will prosecute you.” That same day, Kash Patel had a Wisconsin judge perp-walked out of the courthouse in handcuffs because she allowed a defendant to exit from a side door to the main hall where everyone else, including the FBI, was waiting. Three days later, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt intimated that Trump could have Supreme Court justices arrested.

Roberts can well see that Trump’s henchmen are attacking the judiciary as the last line of defense against an authoritarian coup. Perhaps more difficult to see is that Trump’s attacks, in concert with his deliberate weakening of national security, are acts of sabotage. He is wrecking our constitutional form of government in an effort to replace it with something else. From this perspective, it is difficult to see Trump’s strategy as anything short of treasonous.

A president who projects his own criminality

Throughout his first 100 days, Trump engaged in wild and unprecedented acts of retribution against the rule of law and anyone who tried to make him answer to it. Last week, describing Trump’s executive order to punish and extort lawyers who represented his political adversaries, a federal judge noted, “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue” in an attempt to march the country toward totalitarianism.

Aside from metastasizing power grabs, the most common thread running through Trump’s EOs — announced through a series of White House propaganda papers issued every other day — is Trump’s projection of his own crimes and misdeeds onto others. Anyone trying to map Trump’s elusive plan of governance need only look at what he purports to attack in his orders, because those are his true intentions. On his first day in office, for example, Trump issued an EO “Ending the weaponization of the federal government,” dialing weaponization of government power to levels not seen since King George.

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