Trump’s Allies Turn ‘Illegal Orders’ Into ‘Treason’ — and That’s the Real Danger

Washington has always run on theater, but every so often, the theater becomes so cartoonishly stupid that it distracts from the darker thing happening beneath it.

That’s what unfolded this week, after six Democratic senators posted a short video reminding U.S. service members of something not remotely controversial: They swear an oath to the Constitution and must refuse illegal orders. It was the kind of message that should’ve floated through the news cycle without touching the sides.

Instead, the administration and its media allies treated it as if the senators had filmed themselves detonating a coup.

Stephen Miller called the video “an insurrection.” President Donald Trump escalated to “sedition” and “treason,” adding that such crimes are “punishable by death.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the lawmakers were telling troops to “defy” the commander-in-chief. Speaker Mike Johnson said they were encouraging “rebellion.” Fox News lit up in unison: Sean Hannity warning that Democrats were “breaking the chain of command,” Jesse Watters suggesting a CIA-style destabilization plot, Laura Ingraham describing a campaign to “undermine faith” in the president’s authority.

This is where the stupidity comes in. If you read the senators’ actual words, they never told troops to defy anything. They used a single qualifier — “illegal” — because under U.S. military law, the legality of an order matters as much as the identity of the person giving it. But in the spin-response, that word disappears. “Refuse illegal orders” becomes “refuse orders.” “Follow the Constitution” becomes “betray the president.” If you’re a critic, the move looks dumb.

If you’re paying attention, it’s the opposite.

The erasure works because it exploits a power dynamic ingrained in American culture. Most civilians, and many journalists, conflate presidential authority with the entirety of the law. For two decades after 9/11, we lived inside a commander-in-chief maximalism in which the presidency absorbed ever more symbolic power. Meanwhile, only a sliver of Americans can articulate the constitutional hierarchy embedded in the military oath: the Constitution first, the chain of command second, and the president only insofar as he operates within the law. It’s the default in a country where less than 1 percent serves in the military and where the phrase “illegal order” seems academic rather than operational.

But it isn’t academic. The stakes are concrete. Imagine a president ordering active-duty troops to conduct domestic arrests in a state that has not invoked the Insurrection Act. That would violate the Posse Comitatus Act and the order would be unlawful. Or imagine an order to fire on unarmed civilians during a protest — explicitly prohibited under the Law of Armed Conflict. In either case, UCMJ Article 92 governs: Service members have a duty to disobey unlawful commands.

When that happens, the process is not theoretical. Commanders elevate the report, judge advocates step in, and refusal is documented. During Vietnam, soldiers who declined to participate in unlawful actions were processed through this system; after Abu Ghraib, investigators and military lawyers used the same framework to determine whether personnel followed or resisted illegal directives. The machinery exists. It has been used.

Now imagine what happens if millions of Americans have been taught—by the president, by elected officials, by a coordinated media ecosystem—that any refusal is rebellion, any hesitation is mutiny, any appeal to the Constitution is “treason.” You don’t need actual illegality to produce a constitutional crisis. You only need the public to believe that the concept of an illegal order doesn’t exist. The enforcement of legal boundaries depends on shared understanding. If that understanding dissolves, the guardrails don’t snap—they quietly fail.

This is why Fox News’s role isn’t mere amplification but translation. Each host contributes a piece of a narrative architecture: Hannity frames the senators as subversive, Watters casts it as covert destabilization, Ingraham moralizes it as an attack on presidential honor. They aren’t simply reacting to an administration—they’re rehearsing the audience for a worldview in which legality derives from loyalty. That is the logic required for a presidency that wants its commands treated as self-validating.

The senators’ message wasn’t radical. The reaction to it was. And now we’re left with the question that opened this column: what happens when stupidity is used as camouflage? The answer is that it lowers the country’s immune system. It turns a foundational constitutional safeguard into a partisan litmus test. It redefines loyalty to the law as disloyalty to the leader. And if that reframing becomes the dominant understanding, it becomes materially harder—for service members, judges, or Congress—to push back when a president crosses legal lines.

So what prevents that future? Not platitudes. Clarity. Clear public explanation from civilian leaders and military officials about what constitutes an illegal order, who judges it, and how refusal works in practice. Clear reporting that restores the distinction between presidential will and the law. Clear media coverage that refuses to pretend the two are the same.

Because the danger isn’t simply that a political movement is rewriting the military oath in the national imagination. It’s that too many Americans never learned the original version to begin with.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.