On the menu today: If you’re going to create a video accusing the president of the United States of making unlawful orders, you probably should have at least one or two solid and recent examples in mind before you do so, but apparently that’s just too much to ask from the likes of Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow. But that doesn’t get President Trump off the hook for his unhinged raging that Crow and other Democratic lawmakers ought to be tried and executed for sedition. Still, maybe every incumbent in Washington would prefer to be talking about treason and insurrections than the economy.
Specify Your Unlawful Order Accusations, and Don’t Call for Executing Your Critics
The U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice states, regarding lawful orders:
“Lawfulness. A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States, or lawful superior orders or for some other reason is beyond the authority of the official issuing it. . . . An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime. The lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by the military judge.”
In other words, a military order does not become unlawful simply because it is controversial or unpopular. If you, a citizen outside the military, believe that one of President Trump’s orders to the military is unlawful, we have a whole separate branch of the government called the judiciary to determine if the order violates the law or Constitution.
For six Democrats in Congress, that just isn’t enough.
Senators Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Representatives Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Jason Crow of Colorado recorded a video urging members of the U.S. military to refuse illegal orders. Of course, that’s the existing law; U.S. members of the military have not just the right to refuse illegal orders, but the duty to do so. I suspect many members of the military would respond that they take their oaths seriously and don’t need any reminders from anyone — and certainly not from a likely 2028 presidential candidate who spent a little time as a pitchman for a Chinese vitamin company.
The Democrats’ message:
We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe. We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military. But that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard, and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical. And know that we have your back. Because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.
Now, if you’re going to release a video telling members of the U.S. military that they must refuse illegal orders, it seems more than reasonable to expect you to specify, or at least suggest, which orders the president has issued that you contend are illegal. The Democratic lawmakers did not do that.
And Representative Crow got rather snippy when Martha McCallum of Fox News asked him which orders he had in mind:
McCallum: What law are you talking about that is being broken? And then you said that he is implying that he might do something that they would not want to uphold or follow through with in the future. What are you talking about specifically?
Crow: I appreciate you asking. Number one, the protests in the first Trump administration where he said, “Can’t you just shoot them in the legs or something?” That is a direct quote.
McCallum: That was not a military order, but a comment.
Crow: That is coming from the president of the United States to your generals, don’t you think that’s a request? That is number one.
Several former Trump officials, including former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, have said Trump made comments along those lines on June 1, 2020, while discussing the George Floyd protests in Lafayette Square outside the White House. As bad as it is for the president to say something like that, that is more than five years ago and doesn’t really qualify as an order. Crow continued:
Crow: Number two, he is also threatening to send the military into Chicago and other cities to go to war with those cities. That is a very disturbing thing.
On Truth Social, Trump did post, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” with an AI-generated image of himself as Colonel Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now.
But the following day, when asked about it, Trump said, “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities. We’re going to clean them up so they don’t kill five people every weekend. That’s not war, that’s common sense.”
It appears that even Donald Trump recognizes it is a bad idea for the commander in chief of the armed forces to claim he is declaring “war” on an American city. Trump being recklessly hyperbolic in his social media posts is a bad thing, but it does not constitute an unlawful order.
Crow: Number three, he has also alluded to sending troops to polling stations which is a violation of U.S. law. U.S. criminal law prohibits troops from going to polling stations. He has alluded to that. Those are just one of many examples.
For what it is worth, I cannot find a case of Donald Trump threatening to send U.S. soldiers to polling stations. I can find that back in August 2020, Sean Hannity asked Trump about poll watchers and the president responded, “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals” at polling places. But that’s more than five years ago, that’s not military, and that did not come to pass.
McCallum: You are talking about allusions, and not actual policy. You are not talking about things that members, service members who we revere and respect are actually being asked to do. So when you see this video all over this place, when you see this video on social media, I think lots shake their heads and say, ‘what exactly are they talking about? Are they talking about not allowing gunboats carrying drugs to make it to the United States?’
Crow: Martha, here is a novel idea. How about we actually prevent things from happening before they become a problem?
McCallum: I think that is what they are trying to do.
Crow: What you are saying is we have to wait until there’s a problem to respond to that problem!
Er, yes, because you can’t respond to something if it hasn’t happened yet.
So, the examples that Crow cites are a comment from more than five years ago, a comment on Truth Social, and his misremembering of a Trump comment from more than five years ago.
If you’re thinking “this is about bombing the boats off the coast of Venezuela,” here’s how Crow responded to that question:
Crow: We are not talking about Venezuela at all in this video. We never mentioned it once. But since you raised it, I am deeply concerned.
I have my beefs with that policy as well, but I do not see evidence that the president’s actions in that case constitute unlawful orders; if someone does think that, they ought to file a lawsuit about it.
We can always count on President Trump to take a bad situation and make it worse. Since learning about the Democrats’ video, Trump has continually raged on Truth Social, contending that the Democratic lawmakers have committed “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET”; and “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
The current U.S. president is an unhinged rageaholic who regularly explodes on social media, and it is extremely bad on many levels for the U.S. president to be demanding that members of the opposition party be arrested and executed.
Hey, remember after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, when there was supposed to be this big broad bipartisan commitment to stop calling for our political opponents to be murdered? Yeah, never mind.
Hey, remember when we were so disappointed in Virginia’s Democratic voters for not caring about Jay Jones fantasizing about executing his political opponents and seeing his opponents’ children murdered?
If almost nobody on the right objects to Trump calling for his political opponents to be tried and executed, why would we be surprised that nobody on the left has any problem with this kind of rhetoric, either?
Why Trump Is Crankier Than Usual
The president also likely sees anger as a useful political weapon. The more time that people spend talking about the so-called treason and sedition being committed by Democrats, the less time they’re spending talking about the economy and the sense that Trump’s promised “golden age” hasn’t arrived yet.
The economy is a mixed bag, and the unemployment rate is slowly creeping up. Remember, the position of the president and his administration is that his second inauguration marked “the beginning for our new Golden Age of America,” and the president said, just a few days ago, “we are doing better than we’ve ever done as a country. Prices are coming down and all of that stuff. And you know, they talk about different terms for that, but I will tell you that nobody has done what we’ve done in terms of pricing.”
Three days later, Vice President JD Vance said, “The thing that I’d ask from the American people is a little bit of patience. . . . It’s going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming. We believe that we’re on the front end of it, but we also recognize that we’ve got a lot of work to do to undo the damage that Joe Biden did to the American economy.”
President Trump has been in office for ten months and one day. Yes, changes in economic policies take time to take effect, but since taking office, Trump and his administration have enacted a slew of new tariffs, enacted the DOGE cuts, passed the Big Beautiful Bill, taken an ownership share in several private companies, and dove headfirst into cryptocurrency.
When does the Vice President believe that he and the president and the administration become responsible for the state of the economy? After a year in office? Eighteen months? Because by autumn 2026, Americans will be rendering their verdict at the ballot box.
(Ready for something weird? Jewelry probably represents the ultimate want-not-need product, but in the month of August, jewelry prices increased 6.8 percent. That’s not for the year, that’s in one month — the largest increase in prices ever recorded “since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began reporting the consumer price index in the late 1910s.”)
ADDENDUM: I love it when our Jeff Blehar offers his version of the “the following program contains. . . . Viewer discretion is advised” warning.
Jeff’s version: “Readers, before I begin, I want to stipulate that I loathe every single person involved in the story I am about to discuss, some of them quite passionately, and all of them for slightly different reasons. That means this is going to be fairly vicious.”