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In a 2017 op-ed in The Washington Post, law professor Carlton Larson reviewed the increasing tendency to call other Americans "traitors” and explained: “Speaking against the government, undermining political opponents, supporting harmful policies or even placing the interests of another nation ahead of those of the United States are not acts of treason under the Constitution.” Regarding the promiscuous use of the word by liberals against Trump, Professor Larson wrote: “An enemy is a nation or an organization with which the United States is in a declared or open war . Nations with whom we are formally at peace, such as Russia, are not enemies.” For that reason, even Americans actively helping the Soviet Union during the Cold War could not be accused of “treason” given that there was no declaration of war against the USSR. Using the most extreme hypothetical he could think of to illustrate the point, he explained: “Indeed, Trump could give the U.S. nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin or bug the Oval Office with a direct line to the Kremlin and it would not be treason, as a legal matter.”

For that reason, treason has rarely been prosecuted in the U.S.: “according to the FBI, the U.S. government has successfully convicted fewer than 12 Americans for treason in the nation’s history.” While Americans who rebelled against the British crown were technically traitors, as were those who waged war against the union during the Civil War, prosecutions have been exceedingly rare. That means that through all the various wars the U.S. has fought from the 18th Century until now — the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, the two World Wars of the 20th Century, the Cold War, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the dirty wars in Central America, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Terror — the number of total treason prosecutions is less than a dozen. That is because Americans understood, based on constitutional constraints and Supreme Court law restricting its scope, that this crime is very difficult to charge and applies only in the narrowest of circumstances.