Allow me to elaborate.
The central innovation of what we call democracy, distinguishing it from monarchy, is not really suffrage, or so I shall argue in this little post. After all, suffrage did not extend to women, nor to people of color, who were held as slaves at the time of the founding. Instead, the greatest innovation was to separate the state from the person at the head of the state. In a monarchy, the monarch is the state. The king or queen is the state, and the full power of the state is vested in, embodied in the monarch. Hence, loyalty to the state-- loyalty to the country, even-- is indistinguishable from loyalty to the head of state. To be disloyal to the monarch is to be disloyal to the state, and to the country. They are all one and the same.
One of the great innovations of democracy is to separate the head of the state from the state itself, and even the state from the nation. The nation is the abstraction of that with which the people identify. The whole. The group. We the people. America. Blah, blah, blah. The state is the government. The head of the state... Um... The president is the head of the executive branch, which isn't the same as the head of the government. It is simply one branch of the government. We don't have one person in charge of the whole government. At least, in theory, and according to the Constitution. The theory, and the innovation, though, is to distinguish the head of the state-- the person-- from the state itself, which is not a distinction that exists in a monarchy.
You get where I'm going here. Donald J. Trump cannot comprehend this distinction. Like a Planckian throwback of a scientist unable to comprehend innovations developed after he took his comprehensive exams based on the grad school classes that... he... never took, Trump cannot wrap his very-stable-genius brain around the post-1776 concept of distinguishing the head of the state from the state itself, nor the distinction between the state and the nation. Hence, in Donald J. Trump's Trump-brain, Trump is not only the head of state, he is also America. "I am America. (And so can you!)" Really, so much of the time, he seems like a caricature that it is difficult to grasp the fact that he thinks he's for real. That old Colbert character didn't. Rather terrifying.
In a monarchy, the head of state is the state, and the embodiment of the nation. Hence, the monarch not only has unchecked authority, but to act against the head of state is to act against the state itself, which is to act against the nation.
Now, think about Trump's frequent use of the term, "treason." Treason has a legal definition in the US, but Donald J. Trump doesn't know how to read. He doesn't know the legal definition, and he doesn't care. In a pre-1776 monarchy, to act against the head of state is treason. He is the head of state, and the embodiment of the nation. Any action taken against Trump, by his pre-1776 understanding of the world, really would be treason.
If you think you are a monarch rather than a president, and if you don't understand the innovations of governmental theory brought by the Revolutionary War, these things follow logically.
I am writing this in a snarky manner, but yes, this really is essentially why Trump uses the word, "treason," in the way that he does. He believes that the president is the head of state and embodiment of the nation, and he does not grasp the fact that the underlying political theory of the Revolutionary War was to separate those concepts, because that's the point of not having a monarchy. He... truly doesn't get this.
I'm not done. What else happened in 1776? Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. As I have noted many times, Donald J. Trump is not actually a capitalist. He is a mercantilist. Mercantilism is a debunked economic theory based on the notion that trade is zero-sum. It is pre-fiat currency, and built on the idea that whichever nation buys a product has lost because it has lost its gold, and whichever side sells the product has won because it has accumulated more gold. The object of the game is to accumulate more gold because whoever gets the most gold wins. Trade deficits, obviously, mean you are losing. GOLD!
Adam Smith debunked this nonsense by demonstrating that economies flourish through positive-sum trades. In voluntary transactions, both the buyer and the seller do better by engaging in the exchange because economic transactions are not zero-sum. That's how and why capitalism works.
Donald J. Trump is a mercantilist. He is unable to comprehend the two-and-a-half-century-old observation that voluntary economic transactions are positive-sum, because he cannot wrap his very-stable-genius brain around the notion of anything not being zero-sum. His obsession with tariffs and trade wars, trade deficits, and so forth... this is all because he missed the other critical lesson of 1776-- the concept of capitalism. Like a Newtonian who cannot grasp quantum mechanics, and hence not only rejects it, but pretends it doesn't exist, Trump simply speaks as a relic of a pre-1776 world.
He cannot grasp the concept of a head of state who isn't the state embodied, and the nation embodied. He cannot grasp capitalism.
Cryogenics didn't exist in the pre-Revolutionary War era, and they aren't effective now. Wormholes? Basically theoretical. Relativity? Measurable, but it requires either speeds we cannot achieve, or gravitational forces that would have had other consequences.
Certain other animals have very long life-spans, but Trump does appear biologically human.
I really can't figure out why these not very modern concepts are so far beyond his grasp.
Unless he's just really, really stupid.