The White House says Trump was just kidding about that treason stuff

(Image credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images)

When President Trump casually proposed in a Monday speech that Democrats who did not clap for him during his State of the Union address are "treasonous," he was totes joking around, you guys!

So says White House representative Hogan Gidley, who in a Tuesday statement to NBC News said Trump was merely being "tongue in cheek." The president's point, in NBC's paraphrase, was "that all Americans, regardless of political party, should applaud positive news for the country," Gidley said.

Before he swerved into "treason" territory, Trump did make an argument along those lines. "You're up there, you've got half the room going totally crazy, wild — they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country," he said of the experience of giving the State of the Union address. "And you have the other side, even on positive news — really positive news, like that — they were like death and un-American."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.