‘I Am the United States!’

“Treason?” Donald Trump suggested on Twitter after the publication of an anonymous op-ed written about him in The New York Times this week.

In a rare instance since Donald Trump became president, his wife, Melania, defended him. “You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions,” she told the author of the op-ed.

The American president’s reaction and that of his wife are understandable in the face of such humiliation. But the fact is that they are wrong across the board.

The “senior official” who signed the article, like all his or her allies who are part of “the resistance inside the Trump administration,” are neither traitors nor saboteurs. Quite the contrary.

Trump has never made a distinction between himself and his country.

It is said that King Louis XIV of France once said, “I am the State!” Nearly 400 years later, the Republican president seems arrogant and egocentric enough to think the same thing: “I am the United States!”

Now, the fact is that the author of the op-ed was correct to write that administration staff should serve their country before all else. Thus, preventing their president from making mistakes which would have a dire impact is not an act of treason. It is simply putting country first.

Furthermore, because the United States remains the leading world power (and our unavoidable neighbor), these members of the “resistance” are also protecting the rest of the world by preventing the president from committing any irredeemable act.

This doesn’t mean that the idea of reporting all of this in The New York Times, under the cover of anonymity, was a good one. Rather, it was a strategic error. This rules in Trump’s favor as well as that of some of his more ideological allies who, from the beginning, have claimed that the “deep state” is throwing up roadblocks for the president.

Those who feel that American democracy is a farce and all the other conspiracy theorists will now be able to brandish this document as irrefutable proof that they were right to mistrust the system.

The truth is quite different. There is no conspiracy. The members of Trump’s entourage who decided to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations” are only acting like friends who hide an old buddy’s car keys each time he’s had too much to drink.

These rebels within the administration are not traitors. On the other hand, they aren’t saints either, as they refuse to break the deal with the devil that they signed by agreeing to work for Trump. Just like, for that matter, the vast majority of Republicans in Washington.

Even if they determine that Trump is too morally inept to be president, they are prepared to tolerate him because he is advancing a good number of their ideas.

Like dramatically lowering taxes and raising the defense budget, for example.

The Republicans who behave this way are giving the president’s most fervent supporters the impression that everything is fine, just fine. They are only half-serving their country, as they are duping their fellow citizens. They secure the very existence of the Trump presidency.

They are also wrong in believing that the past is a guarantee of the future. Nothing guarantees that the “adults in the room” who surround Trump will be able to control all of his most dangerous urges.