Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who is notionally challenging Donald Trump for the Republican Party's 2020 presidential nomination, last week claimed Trump is guilty of "treason, pure and simple." He added that "the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death."
Weld thus joined a long list of commentators and politicians in both major parties, including Trump himself, who casually tar their political opponents as traitors. Often, like Weld, they mean this literally, in which case they are demonstrably wrong. Sometimes they are just suggesting that the other side is disloyal and unpatriotic, in which case they are merely contributing to a poisonous political atmosphere that is incapable of supporting rational debate.
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