Donald Trump just called for the execution of American veterans — all of them also elected members of Congress — because they reminded our active duty soldiers that it’s a violation of both American and international law to commit war crimes.
If that’s not impeachable, what is?
This is his most dangerous and insane escalation yet, because it crosses a bright red line the Founders themselves warned about: a president openly demanding the execution of members of Congress for telling U.S. service members to obey the law.
And the horror of it isn’t subtle. It’s not, like in the days of Nixon and Reagan, even coded. It’s not even wink-and-nod stochastic terrorism.
This is the President of the United States calling for hanging lawmakers — by name — for the “crime” of reminding military personnel that their oath is to the Constitution, not to him.
That is the precise scenario the Founders feared when they warned that a would-be tyrant could try to transform the military from defenders of the republic into enforcers of a single man’s will.
What these senators and representatives said in their video is not controversial, not partisan, and not new. It’s bedrock American law. It’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It’s every ethics class, every commissioning oath, every baseline principle of civilian-controlled government in a constitutional republic.
Trump’s reaction — psychotic, paranoid, and dripping with bloodlust — makes one thing painfully clear: he’s terrified of the military remembering who they actually work for.
It also suggests an ominous future Trump may have planned where he turns our military against you and me.
Or uses it against a foreign nation so he can wiggle out of the growing questions about his 1990s teenage modeling agency, his Miss Teen USA pageant, and their possible connections to Jeffrey Epstein and child sex trafficking.
The lawmakers who made that video are, to a person, military and combat veterans or intelligence professionals who’ve literally risked their lives for this country.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) was shot at, launched into space, and flew combat missions over Iraq. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) served in the Air Force. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) was an Army Ranger. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is a Navy vet. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) spent years as a CIA analyst overseeing Iraq policy. These aren’t armchair patriots: they’re the real thing.
So when Trump — who faked bone spurs to dodge Vietnam — calls for them to be executed, it tells you something profound: he wouldn’t be flipping out like this unless he intends to give orders like that.
Everything about this situation is a rerun of January 6th — for which he’s already been impeached — only with the stakes ratcheted up.
Trump has already learned that violent language produces violent followers. He watched it happen in real time. He saw his crowd beat police officers bloody, hunt for Mike Pence, and smash their way through the Capitol while chanting about hanging elected officials.
As I mentioned about the attacks on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), he knows his movement is filled with men eager to “carry out the punishment” for him. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offers a warning — that Trump is lighting a match in a country soaked in gasoline — that isn’t metaphor. It’s a sober assessment grounded in hard experience.
And now Trump is testing the waters again, seeing how far he can go, how hard he can push, before America pushes back.
Consider what these lawmakers actually said in their video: follow lawful orders, refuse unlawful ones, and remember your oath is to the Constitution. That’s the opposite of sedition. It’s literally the definition of military ethics in a democratic society, right out of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, American law, international law, and even the Nuremberg trials
Fox’s commentator Andy McCarthy — hardly a liberal — made this clear:
“There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required.”
Veterans and members of Congress telling soldiers to obey the law? That’s the American system working.
But Trump immediately interpreted it as a threat to himself and his agenda. Not to our country. Not to political or military norms. To him personally.
That should reveal to every American with half a brain who this man really is and what his plans really are.
The cries of “HANG THEM!” and “punishable by DEATH!” aren’t policy positions. They’re the words of an out-of-control authoritarian, a wannabe dictator, a man intent on destroying the rule of law and the American republic that’s been based on it for over two centuries.
They’re the gut-level reactions of a man who thinks loyalty should flow upward to his person, not outward to the nation.
And it’s not a one-off. This is a Trump pattern that necessitates impeachment.
- This is the same Trump who demanded the execution of Gen. Mark Milley.
- The same Trump who encouraged chants of “Hang Mike Pence.”
- The same Trump whose follower mailed pipe bombs to Democratic leaders.
- The same Trump who says generals should be shot, newspapers and TV networks shut down, and political opponents imprisoned.
- Who calls soldiers who died in battle “suckers” and “losers.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — who also avoided military service, like every man in the Trump family — shrieking that veterans should “resign in disgrace” for stating U.S. law is the purest illustration of an authoritarian mindset straight out of 1930s Germany: loyalty is owed to the leader, he suggests, not to the Constitution. And the moment someone asserts otherwise, they’re a traitor.
And Fox “News” giving Miller a platform to do it, without even trying to push back or defend American values of the role of law, is unspeakable.
Which brings us to a remarkable admission from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): Republicans are “afraid” to cross Trump. They’re terrified of Trump’s base, the Confederate flag-waivers, the well-armed Bros. Terrified, because Trump has conditioned those men (virtually all of the violence has come from right wing men) to see critique or embrace of the rule of law as betrayal, and betrayal as punishable.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is right: you can’t negotiate with a party whose operating principle is “wait to see what Trump wants.”
As Murphy noted yesterday in response to Trump’s call to kill Democratic lawmakers:
“If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a f------ side.”
We now have a major political party that openly accepts their president calling for the execution of lawmakers who simply restate the Constitution. And a White House spokeswoman who pathetically backs him up.
Trump isn’t just attacking political rivals: he’s asserting that the American military’s loyalty belongs to him personally, and that those who contradict him should be killed. That is the exact formula the Founders designed the Constitution to prevent.
That’s not normal political dysfunction. That is a republic confronting its own death-throes.
The heartening part — the only heartening part — is the response from the lawmakers themselves.
These elected officials understand the stakes. They know the oaths they took aren’t merely symbolic.
They know that stopping this modern-day rightwing fascism depends on We the People standing up, speaking out, and refusing to be intimidated while we support members of our military — from the most senior levels to the lowest privates — in their refusing to follow illegal orders.
Trump wants a military that obeys him, not the rule of law. That’s why he’s screaming for the deaths of these congressional veterans. It’s also why Congress must impeach him now.
These veterans in Congress reminded the members of our military that their duty is the exact opposite of Trump’s demand for unthinking, unquestioning fealty to illegal orders.
No democracy survives that.