American history notes that one of our previous 44 Presidents died a traitor to his country.
That President was John Tyler, who served from 1841 to 1845. He’d gone with his state of Virginia when the break came in 1861 and considered himself a citizen of the Confederacy when he died later that year.
Musical comedy fans also know we’ve had a vice president who tried to commit treason. That was Aaron Burr, accused of trying to set up an independent empire for himself around New Orleans, in a dicker with France and with Spain.
Later, Republicans kept power for almost two generations by “waving the bloody shirt,” accusing every Democratic candidate for President of being a quasi-Confederate. Except when the party’s corruption disgusted elites (1884, Mugwumps supporting Grover Cleveland) or the party split in two (1912, Wilson vs. Roosevelt and Taft) it worked for 72 years, an entire human lifespan.
We’ve had 20th century Presidents called “traitor.” FDR was called a class traitor during the Great Depression, and the Supreme Court ruled his National Recovery Administration unconstitutional, considering it communist. Joe McCarthy was all about finding traitors in Harry Truman’s State Department and implied the 33rd President was a fellow traveler.
But a true Manchurian President is a first. The closest fiction has come is The Manchurian Candidate, but Laurence Harvey shot his own mother (Angela Lansbury was just three years older than he was at the time) and we were spared the Presidency of James Gregory.
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