Free Gift from TBR!
Dear Reader,
The TBR Sunday Read series “Traitor of the Week” has been our most popular feature to date. Sunday Reads are usually for paid subscribers, but as a special gift I want you to have a free sample. Hope you enjoy it! And thanks, as always, for your support.
—Andy
TBR’s Traitor of the Week
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “quisling” as a traitor. The Britannica dictionary offers a somewhat more specific definition: “a person who helps an enemy that has taken control of his or her country.”
You’d have to be pretty heinous to have a word like that named after you, but Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi collaborator who led Norway during Hitler’s occupation, deserved it. Tried in Oslo for treason and a shitload of other crimes, he was executed in 1945.
Norwegians might hate me for saying this, but I think it’s time to give “quisling” an update—because, right here in the United States of America, we have an embarrassment of traitors crying out for such enshrinement.
Today, I’m introducing a new TBR Sunday Read feature: Traitor of the Week. In addition to finding a replacement for “quisling” in the dictionary, I hope to provide an important public service.
When the current fascist regime ruling the US comes to an end—as all things do—there will be tribunals in which the worst traitors will be held to account, much as Vidkun Quisling was in Oslo. Winnowing the list of Trump’s many enablers will be arduous, time-consuming work. By shining a light on the most egregious of the lot, I hope to assist whoever is ultimately assigned that daunting task.
But first, a ground rule: a Traitor of the Week must be endowed with not just duplicitousness, but selfishness bordering on sociopathy. As the journalist Rosetta Miller Perry wrote in a 2023 opinion piece, a quisling is “someone who collaborates with an enemy occupying force for personal gain.” (FYI, Perry’s piece was entitled, “Vivek Ramasamy is the Ultimate Quisling.”) And so, as I choose candidates for Traitor of the Week, I will narrow my focus to people who are enabling this lawless regime out of ambition and/or greed—and not out of a sincere belief that what Trump is doing is good for the nation.
For that reason, someone like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will not be a Traitor of the Week. You can hurl a lot of insults at Marge, but one thing you can’t say is that she’s pretending to be dumb to suck up to Trump. In October of last year, for example, she claimed that Democrats were using technology to make hurricanes hit red states. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” You can’t fake that kind of stupid.
So, according to my ground rule, “greene” could never replace “quisling” in the dictionary. To make Traitor of the Week, you have to be someone who knows better—but has chosen to betray the United States anyway.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rolling out Traitors of the Week for your consideration. It would be physically debilitating to attempt to profile all of Trump’s enablers, but I will do my best to highlight the worst of the worst. Once I’ve shared a number of these candidates, I’ll invite you to vote for America’s Top Traitor.
With that preamble over, it’s time to reveal TBR’s inaugural Traitor of the Week:
Quisling No. 1: Scott Bessent
Bessent’s nomination as Treasury Secretary drew praise from many in the business community, who found his decades-long career in mainstream finance reassuring. At any rate, he wasn’t plucked off the couch at “Fox & Friends.”
And he wasn’t a raving MAGA ideologue, either—he’d even had a stint working for the GOP’s most-despised liberal supervillain, George Soros. While running Soros’s London office in 1992, he made a shrewd bet against the British pound which wound up costing the UK billions and helped put a fork in the Conservative government.
After Trump tapped Bessent, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Yale Chief Executive Institute, called the nomination “a huge relief,” adding, "Bessent is reasonable and pragmatic.” He easily won Senate confirmation, by a vote of 68 to 29, with the support of 16 Democrats.
Bessent sure didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d then turn around and give Elon Musk’s computer-science dropouts unprecedented access to the US Treasury’s computers.
That development sufficiently alarmed five former Treasury Secretaries—Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, and Janet Yellen—to impel them to write a New York Times opinion piece entitled, “Our Democracy Is Under Siege.”
Excoriating the pimply DOGE kids, they warned, “They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data—like Social Security numbers and bank account information. Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries. And our critical infrastructure is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care.”
The five Treasury veterans took some comfort in Bessent’s denial that Musk’s DOGE squad had done anything to actually block federal payments. But, according to the Associated Press, that denial was false.
“Officials working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sought access to the U.S. Department of Treasury payment system to stop money from flowing to the U.S. Agency for International Development,” the AP reported. “DOGE’s efforts to stop USAID payments undermine assurances that the department gave to federal lawmakers in a Tuesday letter that it sought only to review the integrity of the payments and had ‘read-only access’ to the system as part of an audit process.”
During his eventual tribunal, Bessent might want to put some distance between himself and the much-reviled Musk, but comments he has made on the record would complicate that effort. "Elon and I are completely aligned,” he told a Bloomberg podcast.
Should “bessent” be the new “quisling”? Definitely a strong contender.
Quisling No. 2: Marco Rubio
There was a time, not so long ago, when Marco Rubio was on the right side of history.
“As soon as I take office, I will move quickly to increase pressure on Moscow,” the then-US senator said when he was running for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. “Under my administration, there will be no pleadings for meetings with Vladimir Putin. He will be treated for what he is—a gangster and a thug.”
He was also right about another gangster-slash-thug: Donald J. Trump.
"He runs on this idea that he is fighting for the little guy,” he said during that campaign. “But he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy... If you all have friends who are thinking about voting for Donald Trump, friends do not let friends vote for con artists."
Apparently believing that “when they go low, we go lower,” Trump said on Fox News, “I call him little Marco... he’s a very nasty guy.”
But Rubio proved that Trump wasn’t the only one who could call things little: "Have you seen his hands?… And you know what they say about men with small hands?"
This sort of oratory seemed unlikely to eclipse the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but when it came time to choose their nominee, GOP voters decided that they preferred Trump’s insult-comic chops to Rubio’s. Once that became clear, expediency demanded that Rubio bury the hatchet.
Putting his ambition squarely ahead of his principles, Little Marco was all too happy to toss his little hat in the ring when the twice-impeached insurrectionist with 34 felony convictions was choosing a running mate in 2024. "I think anybody who would be offered that should be honored," Rubio said.
Alas, it was not to be, as the Hillbilly Effigy, JD Vance, won the anointment instead. But Li’l Marco would have another opportunity to debase himself when Trump tapped him as Secretary of State.
Compared to the other passengers in Trump’s clown Cybertruck of a Cabinet, Rubio appeared to have something vaguely resembling gravitas. This created false hope that Li’l Marco would be that long-sought unicorn in Trumpworld: the “adult in the room.”
"Adversaries are uniting,” the hawkish-sounding Rubio told CNN. “North Korea, Iran, China, Russia [are] increasingly coordinating—it's going to require us to be very pragmatic and wise and how we invest overseas and what we do.”
Comments like those offered reassurance that Rubio could put the brakes on Trump’s impulse to shred the rules-based international order and replace it with the dog-eat-dog system codified on “The Apprentice.” In one of the more remarkable displays of magical thinking by the US Senate, Rubio was confirmed unanimously.
That was less than six weeks ago.
Since then, the United States voted against a UN resolution blaming Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, a move that aligned the US with such beacons of democracy as North Korea, Sudan, and Belarus. Rubio raised no objection when Trump blamed the invasion of Ukraine on an unlikely suspect—Ukraine—and called its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator.” And after Trump and Vance disgraced the US by scolding Zelensky on live TV in the Oval Office, Rubio said this of the Ukrainian leader, who has been called the bravest head of state since Winston Churchill: “I think he should apologize for wasting our time for a meeting that was going to end the way it did.”
When Rubio is brought to justice in his tribunal, I’m confident that the jury will reach this unanimous verdict: Little Marco is a Big Traitor.
READ NEXT: Quisling No. 3
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