“…. and soon the school feels to Werner like a grenade with its pin pulled.”

As I reread this morning Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See (2014), I reached the chapter entitled Everything Poisoned where that partial sentence appears. How astonishing that I would arrive at those remarkable words and the idea they capture as I was struggling to finish the post that follows below. Doerr’s observation about the young German Werner, one of the major characters in the story, captured perfectly how I, and millions of others here and around the world, felt watching the President of the United States, working in synchrony with his Vice President and his Secretary of State, ambush the popular, war-battered President of Ukraine at a press event called for that very purpose.

And make no mistake, while there may be no written script for the event we’ll ever see, I and many others are certain beyond any doubt that the attack was planned. The phony umbrage of JD Vance was calculated to unleash Trump’s angry denunciation of President Zelensky while Marco Rubio sat, hands folded, seemingly hoping no one would notice him. Everyone played their part to perfection at a public event that had no apparent purpose except to sabotage the mineral rights deal that Trump purported to want but only, it turns out, if Ukraine essentially surrendered to Putin’s Russia.

Zelensky wasn’t having it. Trump knew or should have known would be true and thus played out the end-game for the day: kill the deal while acting outraged that a visiting head of state engaged in an existential fight for the very survival of his country would have the temerity to disagree with the great and powerful Donald Trump making multiple demonstrably false claims about the war.

Why do this? Because Trump knew that Putin, the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war, did not want the United States to support Ukraine. Putin does not want peace. He wants conquest. Nothing could be clearer.

But, as he did during his first term with the COVID pandemic and the attempt to blackmail Zelensky into undermining Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy, Trump miscalculated both Zelensky’s character and the worldwide support for the survival of Ukraine as an independent democracy. The Republican sycophants who support Trump will proclaim their usual wonderment at how Trump “stood up” for the United States, but the reality is that he stood up for Putin’s Russia and sold out the United States once again.

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny among others, promptly posted a video on Substack entitled Five Failures in the Oval Office in which he outlines how Trump failed the country at the Zelensky lynching. https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/five-failures-in-the-oval-office?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email The video takes less than six minutes and should be watched.

I am going to go a step beyond Professor Snyder. This post was originally intended to address only Trump’s directive that the United States vote twice with Russia against Ukraine on United Nations resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I will return to that but first ….

I make no claim to expertise in the subject of how the Constitution defines “treason.” But I have the Supreme Court to help, along with other credible sources.

Important background:

As the Library of Congress’s Constitution Annotated notes, the Framers were wary of vesting the power to declare and punish treason in Congress. Having just won their independence from Great Britain, the Framers had seen how the English kings and British Parliament had escalated “ordinary partisan disputes into capital charges of treason.” In other words, the ruling class used the crime of treason to eliminate their political dissidents.https://constitution.findlaw.com/article3/annotation24.html

Perhaps because of the limiting history of the constitutional definitions, there is almost no precedent in case law. There is a statute on the books, however:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States. [18 US Code § 2381 (1948)]

And there is Haupt v. United States, 330 U.S. 631 (1947) wherein the Supreme Court went to some lengths to spell out what is required to establish “treason” and which remains, as far as I can tell, as the last word on the subject.

The charges against Mr. Haupt related to aid and comfort he provided to his son with knowledge of the son’s mission to aid Germany in its war with the United States. After his arrest, Haupt volunteered information to FBI agents including that he had been present when the son told the complete story of his travel outside the U.S., his return by German submarine with large sums of money and plans to be a saboteur. During his confinement in the Cook County jail, Haupt also talked with two fellow prisoners concerning his case; they testified as to damaging admissions made to them.

Ultimately twelve overt acts in three categories asserted to be treasonous were submitted to the jury: (1) Haupt accompanied his son to assist him in obtaining employment in a plant engaged in manufacturing a bomb sight; (2) he harbored and sheltered his son; and (3) he accompanied his son to an automobile sales agency, arranging, making payment for, and purchasing an automobile for the son. Each of these was alleged to be in aid of the son’s known purpose of sabotage. The Supreme Court was faced with Haupt’s argument that his motives were merely those of a loving father supporting a son.

Key findings:

• … the minimum function of the overt act in a treason prosecution is that it show action by the accused which really was aid and comfort to the enemy. Cramer v. United States,325 U.S. 1 (1945); This is a separate inquiry from that as to whether the acts were done because of adherence to the enemy, for acts helpful to the enemy may nevertheless be innocent of treasonable character;
• Cramer’s caseheld that what must be proved by the testimony of two witnesses is a “sufficient” overt act.
• … there can be no question that sheltering, or helping to buy a car, or helping to get employment is helpful to an enemy agent, that they were of aid and comfort to Herbert Haupt in his mission of sabotage. They have the unmistakable quality which was found lacking in the Cramercase of forwarding the saboteur in his mission.
• We hold, therefore, that the overt acts laid in the indictment and submitted to the jury do perform the functions assigned to overt acts in treason cases, and are sufficient to support the indictment and to sustain the convictions if they were proved with the exactitude required by the Constitution.
•  The Constitution requires that “No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act . . . .” Art. III, § 3.
• And while two witnesses must testify to the same act, it is not required that their testimony be identical. Most overt acts are not single, separable acts, but are combinations of acts or courses of conduct made up of several elements. It is not easy to set by metes and bounds the permissible latitude between the testimony of the two required witnesses. It is perhaps easier to say on which side of the line a given case belongs than to draw a line that will separate all permissible disparities from forbidden ones….and it is not required that testimony be so minute as to exclude every fantastic hypothesis that can be suggested.
• The law of treason makes, and properly makes, conviction difficult, but not impossible…. [Haupt’s] mission was frustrated, but defendant did his best to make it succeed. His overt acts were proved in compliance with the hard test of the Constitution, are hardly denied, and the proof leaves no reasonable doubt of the guilt.

The judgment is Affirmed.

The Court thus found that, given the incriminating testimony of the required two witnesses, it was for the jury to decide between “treason” and “just a father helping his son get along.”

Mr. Justice Douglas wrote a concurring opinion, noting “…. As the Cramer case makes plain, the overt act and the intent with which it is done are separate and distinct elements of the crime. Intent need not be proved by two witnesses, but may be inferred from all the circumstances surrounding the overt act …. The requirement of an overt act is to make certain a treasonable project has moved from the realm of thought into the realm of action.”

Mr. Justice Murphy dissented in an opinion that suggested it was for the courts rather than the jury to decide whether “reasonable doubt” existed as to the true nature of the acts in dispute. Happily, that was not and is not the law.

The foregoing, I believe, fairly summarizes the law governing sustainable findings of treason.

Before turning to why I believe Donald Trump, among others, is plainly guilty of treason, you should also be aware of some facts set out in Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (2024) by Anne Applebaum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, A History of the Soviet Camps (2004) and author of Twilight of Democracy, among others:

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, the first full-scale kinetic battle in the struggle between Autocracy, Inc. and what might loosely be described as the democratic world. Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo. The invasion was planned in that spirit. Putin hoped not only to acquire territory, but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold.

From the very first days of the war, Putin and the Russian security elite ostentatiously demonstrated their disdain for the language of human rights, their disregard for the laws of war, their scorn for international law and for treaties they themselves had signed. They arrested public officials and civic leaders: mayors, police officers, civil servant, school directors, journalists, artists, museum curators. They built torture chambers for civilians …. They kidnapped thousands of children, ripping some away from their families, removing others from orphanages, gave them new “Russian” identities and prevented them from return home to Ukraine. [Autocracy, Inc. at 13]

And more. And more. Those facts are not disputable by anyone with a functioning mind and the ability to disassociate from the penumbra of subordination cast by Donald Trump on his followers.

The conclusion from that and much other evidence, all well-known, is that Russia under Putin is the enemy of the United States. To anyone observing Putin and his statements and behavior, he has made it clear beyond any doubt that he regards American democracy and our constitutional freedoms as anathema. Multiple investigations here have shown beyond doubt extensive Russian interference in our elections and more.

It is also clear beyond doubt that there are more than two witnesses to Trump’s issuing of instructions to the interim U.S. representative to the U.N to vote with Russia and against Ukraine. There is no possibility she would have just done this on her own without instructions from the highest level. Speaking in Trumpish, “America’s acting envoy to the UN, Dorothy Camille Shea, described the US resolution as a “simple historic statement… that looks forward, not backwards. A resolution focused on one simple idea: ending the war”. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7435pnle0go

Now add the sickening spectacle of Trump and Vance aligning with Putin’s Russia against Zelensky’s Ukraine and you have the perfect description of multiple acts of giving “aid and comfort” to an avowed enemy of the United States.

Trump has abandoned the western alliance formed after WWII and aligned himself and now the U.S. government with Russian aggression against a free and independent democracy on its border. Given the bizarre collection of appointments Trump has made to positions high in our defense, security and intelligence apparatus, it is not farfetched to believe that he is preparing to gift Ukraine to Russia and likely a lot more.

Recall that Trump is the same person who removed highly confidential documents from the White House when he left in 2021 and that he refused to return them, lied about what he had and engaged in overt acts to hide what he had from authorities seeking their protection and return. The FBI under Trump’s new appointed leadership has just returned those documents to Trump!

So now, etched in our memories forever, is the pathetic spectacle of Trump and his henchman JD Vance, with the silent acquiescence of Marco Rubio, attacking and berating Volodymyr Zelensky in an almost certainly staged event for that very purpose. Trump, self-satisfied that he had accomplished his mission, freely noted at the end that it would “make great television.” In this pathetic demonstration of anti-American animus, Trump gave further aid and comfort to a declared enemy of the United States he took an oath to defend. You can read a reasonably accurate account of the episode here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/trump-zelensky-us-ukraine-russia.html

This was a first in American diplomatic history and, I believe, an obvious effort to sabotage Zelensky and Ukraine in front of the American people. Trump set up the press event and, with VP Vance chiming in with a personal attack near the end, erupted when Zelensky tried to explain the true situation Ukraine faces with Russian aggression. Vance and Trump acted like Zelensky had forced his way into the White House, called the press event himself and then outrageously used it to stand up for the freedom of his country that is under existential attack designed to eliminate the very existence of the country.

Trump, as usual had spent the first two-thirds of the press event talking about himself, what a great negotiator he is, how he only wants the best for the United States, how he was persecuted, how terrible Presidents Obama and Biden were, on and on and on, the same old mindless lies and blather.

In my opinion, the entire nightmarish scene was planned to undermine Ukraine and Zelensky. Trump knows Putin does not want peace; he wants conquest. And it won’t stop with Ukraine if he’s successful. Trump had no intention of making a deal with Zelensky unless it involved the total surrender of Ukraine to Russia.

I have no idea what leverage Putin has on Trump – you have no doubt read many of the same stories and speculations as I have – but whatever it is, it must be very strong to produce such overt appeasement that rivals or exceeds anything ever seen in world relations. Russian media ate it up, of course, just as one would expect. Peter Baker, White House reporter, wrote that

Never has an American president lectured the leader of an ally in public like this, much less the leader of a country that is fighting off invaders.

I have covered the White House since 1996. There has never been an Oval Office meeting in front of cameras like this in all that time.

The damage Trump/Vance did to United States standing in the world is immeasurable and unforgivable. It was, I believe, pure and simple treason.