Because I try to keep up with the ongoing RussiaGate ruse, I follow on Twitter many of the major peddlers of this nonsense. Many of them casually toss around accusations of disloyalty by Trump and his supporters and, as I noted in my last article, even treason. They frequently invoke country, the flag, the Constitution, etc. and suggest that Trump cares nothing about any of these and is instead a pawn of Vladimir Putin. Of course this is all absurd on its face.

First of all, authentic liberals, of which there appear to be very few remaining, should see the peril of this line of argument. Anyone who disagrees with a certain political position is automatically disloyal and either a willing accomplice or a dupe of the enemy. It is also highly ironic that the nation that supposedly commands their loyalty instead of the U.S. is Russia, just now the shoe is on the other foot. It’s now leftists, Democrats, and other anti-Trumpers who are making the accusations of disloyalty against conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters. Have the anti-Trumpers forgotten their relatively recent Cold War history? They are engaging in modern day Red Baiting and encouraging a new Red Scare, something they used to decry.

Secondly, during the campaign before the Russia charge became useful to the opposition, Trump was being accused by his detractors of exactly the opposite. According to his critics, Trump was too much of a chauvinistic nationalist, too wedded to old ideas about the nation state, and lacked sufficient understanding and appreciation of the modern globalized economy.  His opposition to open borders, opposition to international trade deals, embrace of America first foreign policy rhetoric, and his skepticism about our entangling alliances such as NATO proved he was a throwback nationalist who was insufficiently internationalist in orientation. How, pray tell, can one be both a too loyal hyper-nationalist for invoking “America first” and rejecting trade deals, yet at the same time the disloyal pawn of a foreign nation? Trump’s opponents can’t even keep their stories straight.

The primary institutional opposition to Trump has always come from defenders of the “liberal international order,” whether left or “right.” Trump rightly frightens these internationalists because his general mindset and his positions on trade, immigration and foreign policy go against the reigning globalist neoliberal consensus, and the prime peddlers of the RussiaGate farce continue to be motivated by their support for stand pat globalism.

So perhaps people whose primary loyalty is to the “liberal international order” rather than their own country, and who see their country more as the enforcer of said order rather than an actual place and an actual people, should cool it with the accusations of disloyalty, treason, lack of patriotism, etc. Perhaps people who view national borders as administrative impediments to improved efficiency should not be questioning the loyalty of a President who unabashedly loves his country and the red-blooded Americans who support him in large part because of his Make America Great Again agenda.