Can Troops Disobey Trump?

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Hi, it’s Wednesday, November 26, 2025, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller.

Last week, six Democratic members of Congress released a video telling the armed forces something that is well established and well-known within the military community: they shouldn’t follow illegal orders. This is uncontroversial. It is widely accepted. So tell me why, immediately, the President of the United States belligerently responded, calling the video seditious, first saying the congressmembers should be put on trial, then saying their behavior is punishable by death? Today we’re breaking down whether our servicemembers have to follow illegal orders, and what it means that the President of the United States is calling for sitting members of congress to be put to death.

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This headline from TIME caught my eye, “‘It Won’t Work’: Mark Kelly Pushes Back Against Pentagon Investigation Into Him.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can see that in the US TIME is considered “left leaning.” To get the big picture, I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

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Let’s just take a moment to watch the video that the President of the United States says that sitting members of Congress should be executed over.

[insert clip].

That’s it, that’s the video. This brazen reminder to members of our armed forces to… not break the law. But for a man who demands loyalty from the top down, the idea that some lowly foot soldier might be encouraged to, god forbid, think for themself when ordered to, I don’t know, shoot an unarmed US civilian or bomb a civilian boat at sea, that is beyond the pale. And it got the full Trump regime whipped up into a frenzy. And it’s important to watch their propaganda machine whirr into action here because they follow the same playbook every time. Twist the words and the law to make it sound like what they’re saying is reasonable and by the book and what their enemies are saying or doing clearly and unquestionably illegal. It doesn’t matter what the law actually says, it doesn’t matter how things are typically done. As long as they say it with enough confidence, they’re sure their base of support will go along with them.

You can see it in the way Karoline Leavitt parrotted the regime’s talking points to the BBC recently: [insert clip]. “All lawful orders are presumed to be legal.” Yeah. Yeah I would presume that a lawful order would be presumed to be legal. That checks out. That a lawful order. Would be legal. That’s not what the video said though. The video said that service members should not follow UNLAWFUL orders. But the Department of Defense, self-dubbed “Department of War” took it a step further. In an official announcement which, once again, I would like to stress how fucking stupid it is that the “official announcements” from our government are being funnelled through Twitter, a shitty social media app owned by the richest man on the planet who until very recently played a major role in said government, anyway through a tweet the DOD announced that they had received a serious allegation of misconduct against Mark Kelly and they would be initiating a thorough review of the allegations, which could lead to court martial proceedings. The announcement goes on to say quote “All servicemembers are reminded that they have a legal obligation under the UCMJ to obey lawful orders and that orders are presumed to be lawful.”

All orders from military commanders are presumed to be lawful. Servicemembers should operate from the assumption that the order given to them is lawful. That’s also nothing new. And that also does not contradict what the video said. Even when orders from above have a PRESUMPTION of lawfulness, every presumption is rebuttable, and if the order is unlawful, service members should not obey them.

Which then poses the question: how can service members tell if something is or isn’t lawful? And THAT is the question you should be asking. And it presents a dangerous legal gray area that puts our servicemembers into a precarious position, one that the regime is assuming will mean that members will air on the side of caution and just go with what they’re being told. And given what we learned about the Nuremberg trials in a recent episode, it is true that just “following orders” is a really popular fallback when it comes to committing war crimes. But at least under the military code, there is actually no protection for servicemembers if they were “just following orders” and commit an illegal act.

Please note I am plagiarizing myself here, some of this I already said in my October 22nd video, but in light of recent events this absolutely bears repeating and I will probably continue to repeat myself on this topic: members of the armed forces are not only permitted to refuse unlawful orders, they are REQUIRED to refuse unlawful orders.

According to an article in the Military Times, not a publication I often cite to, quote “Troops who are ordered to do something illegal are put in a bind — so much so that some argue that troops themselves are harmed when given such orders. They are not trained in legal nuances, and they are conditioned to obey. Yet if they obey “manifestly unlawful” orders, they can be prosecuted. Some analysts fear that U.S. troops are ill-equipped to recognize this threshold.” However the authors of the article are researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who recently did a study that found that 4 in 5 service members do understand the distinction between legal and illegal orders, the duty to disobey certain orders, and when they should do so.

The article goes on to say quote “U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.

Our poll, fielded between June 13 and June 30, 2025, shows that service members understand these rules. Of the 818 active-duty troops we surveyed, just 9% stated that they would “obey any order.” Only 9% “didn’t know,” and only 2% had “no comment.””

The article says quote “But the open-ended answers pointed to another struggle troops face: Some no longer trust U.S. law as useful guidance.

Writing in their own words about how they would know an illegal order when they saw it, more troops emphasized international law as a standard of illegality than emphasized U.S. law.

Others implied that acts that are illegal under international law might become legal in the U.S.

“Trump will issue illegal orders,” wrote one respondent. “The new laws will allow it,” wrote another. A third wrote, “We are not required to obey such laws.”

Several emphasized the U.S. political situation directly in their remarks, stating they’d disobey “oppression or harming U.S. civilians that clearly goes against the Constitution” or an order for “use of the military to carry out deportations.””

Quote “Criminologist Eva Whitehead researched actual cases of troop disobedience of illegal orders and found that when some troops disobey — even indirectly — others can more easily find the courage to do the same.

Whitehead’s research showed that those who refuse to follow illegal or immoral orders are most effective when they stand up for their actions openly.

The initial results of our survey — coupled with a recent spike in calls to the GI Rights Hotline — suggest American men and women in uniform don’t want to obey unlawful orders.”

As the article said, troops are not lawyers, they are conditioned to obey, international law is extensive and nuanced, and often they are making game time decisions when being handed down orders from commanding officers. If they get it wrong, if they make the wrong call and refuse to obey an order they think is illegal and then they get punished and it is found that the order was NOT illegal, their refusal to obey would put their entire careers on the line. On the other hand, if they commit a war crime they could be tried for it and saying “well my commanding officer told me to do it” is not a valid defense.

The way around this, and the thing that props up the presumption that orders from above are lawful, is the use of JAGs, the lawyers put in place to advise the armed forces. It is assumed that a lawyer has reviewed the legality of an operation and the orders involved in the operation, and therefore it is a service member’s duty to carry out the orders, not to sit around pondering legal ethics. The PROBLEM with that presumption is that Trump fired all the military lawyers. Back in February, Trump via Pete Hegseth fired the top Judge Advocates General, that’s JAGs, from the air force, the army, and the navy. As military dot com wrote, another source I don’t often cite to, the JAGs quote “play the important role of setting each service's legal priorities and interpreting military law for top leaders. Their roles have been historically viewed as apolitical, and they oversee everything from a wide variety of criminal cases involving the rank and file to making sure commanders are aware of international law in combat.”

When asked, back in February, WHY the regime just purged the military of its lawyers, Pete Hegseth responded that they would pose quote “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The lawyers who tell our armed forces what they can and cannot do under international law and the constitution were seen as roadblocks to the president, the commander in chief. It was shocking then but now we’re seeing how this is playing out and how the regime is doubling down. The JAGs have been replaced, Major General Bobby Christine assumed duties as the JAG for the US Army back in July, he does have extensive legal and military experience and is qualified for the role, but he was a Trump appointed judge during Trump’s first term and given how deep the Heritage Foundation has its tentacles into the judicial selection process I can’t imagine he wasn’t heavily vetted by far right extremists in our government before being selected. That being said, it was believed that Trump thought he would go along with election fraud allegations in Georgia where he was a judge, and Christine did not pursue those allegations and in fact found there was nothing to them. So that does give me some hope that there are still lawyers with ethics who are not just Trump sycophants in the armed forces. That being said, the willingness our army historically has shown to stretch the confines of international law I think it’s all relative here.

But the point is, the Trump regime has made it clear that they are very concerned with WHO gets to make the calls about what is and isn’t legal for the army to do, and they are going to clamp down on anyone who tries to encourage servicemembers to think for themselves or question the supreme leader.

But it is somewhat heartening that there is a large percentage of military personnel who take very seriously their duty to disobey unlawful orders. That, combined with the subdued reception that Trump and Hegseth received in that room full of high level military officials a few months ago does give me hope that our military personnel by and large have moral and ethical compasses at least when it comes to being turned against US civilians obviously I’m not talking about the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed around the world by the US military for decades and centuries let’s not get carried away.

And for an individual soldier to decide that an order is illegal, they likely face an uphill battle. According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal quote “"Under the present deployments, the legality of the orders is dubious, but historically it’s not within the ken of any individual service members to make a decision," said John W. Hall, a professor of military history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A lack of legal options hasn’t stopped U.S. soldiers from resisting orders in the past.

"The U.S. has had a democratic tradition when it comes to military service where, though you pay a price for dissent, when that occurs, it’s a warning to the political leadership that even the troops who are ordered to do these things will speak out," said David Cortright, a professor at the Notre Dame Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Cortright participated in that kind of resistance himself after being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Stationed in New York, he participated in protests in Manhattan when he was off duty and signed a petition against the war.

His efforts to resist got him reassigned to a base in Texas, where "all we did was clean the barracks floor continuously for months," said Cortright.

"If you join in protests, you have to know or expect you could face punishment, commanders never like it when their soldiers disagree with the mission. But back with Vietnam, we didn’t care," he said. "The thinking soldier is a real thing, thank goodness for our society, we’re not just robots."”

And it was that video of the six Democratic congressmembers that was betting on servicemembers taking seriously their oath to the constitution and to only obey lawful orders, and the belief that soldiers AREN’T just robots. And the regime saw that as very threatening. They are targeting Mark Kelly specifically for potential retaliation, though all of them have been reprimanded, sent threatening letters from the administration, and have received extensive harassment online now that they are the latest targets of Trump’s minions. But Mark Kelly is the one that they are threatening with real legal action. According to reporting from Time quote “All six senators who participated in the video previously served either in the military or in national security positions, though Kelly is the only one that was a senior officer in the military. That makes him the only one of the group who by law remains available for recall to the military.

“Five of the six individuals in that video do not fall under Department of War jurisdiction (one is CIA and four are former military but not “retired”, so they are no longer subject to UCMJ),” Defense Director Pete Hegseth said on X, while calling the video “despicable.” “However, Mark Kelly (retired Navy Commander) is still subject to UCMJ—and he knows that.””

The UCMJ itself says that servicemembers only should follow LAWFUL orders, but the Trump regime is arguing that he was in violation of the UCMJ by interfering with the loyalty, order, and discipline of the armed forces. By, once again just as a reminder, telling servicemembers they shouldn’t follow ILLEGAL ORDERS. Which is IN THE HANDBOOK.

Trump of course said Kelly and the others were also guilty of sedition. Trump should be quite familiar with sedition but doesn’t really read too good so I will remind us all what sedition is: 18 USC section 2384 defines seditious conspiracy as when two or more people conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy the US government by force, or to oppose by force the authority of the government or BY FORCE to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the united states. That crime is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Like say for example you encourage a group of people to violently storm the capital building to prevent the certification of an election. Just as, like, a minor example. Trump is saying that those congressmembers are guilty of that. That’s the definition under the civilian code. Under the UCMJ, again that’s the military law, the law is more strict, and the punishment is more severe. There, the UCMJ says quote “Any person subject to this chapter who—

with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition;

OR fails to do his utmost to prevent and suppress a mutiny or sedition being committed in his presence, or fails to take all reasonable means to inform his superior commissioned officer or commanding officer of a mutiny or sedition which he knows or has reason to believe is taking place, is guilty of a failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition.

A person who is found guilty of attempted mutiny, mutiny, sedition, or failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.” THAT is what the Trump regime is threatening against Mark Kelly, a sitting member of Congress and heavily decorated combat vet and astronaut, for appearing in a VIDEO in which he reminds servicemembers of what the UCMJ says. But it so threatens the Trump regime’s reliance on the armed forces to do its dirty work that the regime is willing to try to make an example of Mark Kelly.

Kelly for his part has vowed to not be bullied into silence. The Pentagon investigation into a sitting member of Congress IS NOT NORMAL. Let’s be clear about that. And it is a continuation of this regime’s attempts to hold Trump's named enemies to account. James Comey and Letitia James both had their indictments dismissed this week, adding to the evidence that Trump’s accusations aren’t based on anything other than spite and fearmongering. Kelly is just the next in a long line of targets. And I’m sure those congressmembers knew that when making the video, which I think was really brave. It doesn’t change anything, but as that article I quoted from earlier said, when one person stands up and says an order is unlawful publicly, that often results in more servicemembers being willing to stand up against unlawful orders. I have no doubt that seeing six members of Congress, themselves former intelligence or armed forces officers, reminding them that they should not follow unlawful orders, I think that does mean something, given what we know about how that example can inspire others to act. Is it going to stop the extrajudicial murders of Venezuelans in boats in the Caribbean who may or may not be trafficking drugs? No. Let’s not go that far. Even though many experts call murdering civilians who aren’t engaged in armed conflict a “crime against humanity” that hasn’t stopped us before. But it MAY give our servicemembers pause before pulling a Kent State and murdering us in cold blood on US soil. And just in time for Christmas!

And if you’d like to support my work this holiday season, consider joining here on YouTube by clicking the big join button below, or supporting me over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja miller, where you get access to all these episodes completely ad free. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Christopher Cowan, Amber Arwood, Evan Friedley, Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, Anthony Jiles, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Monday about why the fascists want to keep you thin.

Leeja Miller
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