President Trump has a long history of disparaging members of the military who disagree with him. Back in 2015, he shrugged off John McCain’s five and a half years as a POW with “He’s not a war hero… I like people who weren’t captured,” and kept sniping at him even after he died. It runs through his public fight with a Gold Star family, where he suggested Ghazala Khan stayed silent because of her religion and compared their son’s death in Iraq to his own “sacrifices” as a businessman. And it includes the now-infamous reports that he called Americans killed in World War I “losers” and Marines at Belleau Wood “suckers,” and didn’t want “wounded guys” in his parade because “nobody wants to see that.” Those specific quotes come from reporting in The Atlantic and other outlets, based on multiple anonymous and later corroborating sources, which the Trump White House has of course denied, but they track perfectly with his public behavior.

So when he turns around years later and suggests that Sen. Mark Kelly—a decorated Navy combat pilot and astronaut—should be investigated, court-martialed, even face death for reminding service members of something every one of us was taught from day one, it fits a pattern. You don’t obey unlawful orders. In fact, you have a duty not to.

And honestly, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that a rich kid who used every tool at his disposal, including his father’s pull, to avoid military service would grow up to be a man who feels threatened by people who actually answered the call. Trump received multiple draft deferments during the Vietnam era, including the now-famous bone-spur diagnosis—a diagnosis that the doctor’s own daughters, as well as his former lawyer Michael Cohen, have said was given as a favor arranged by Trump’s father.

So when he runs into someone as decorated and unimpeachable as Mark Kelly, it’s no wonder he lashes out. The guy flew combat missions as a Navy pilot, spent years in uniform, retired as a captain, then literally left the planet for work as a NASA astronaut, before continuing his service in the Senate. That’s about as “all-American” a résumé as you can find. If that scares Trump, which it obviously does, that’s on him.

But back to the “unlawful orders” part. Where does that come from? When we enlist, we all take the same oath:

OATH OF ENLISTMENT

I, ____, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

At a quick glance, it’s easy for someone who never served to read that and assume it means troops must obey any presidential order, lawful or not. But that’s not how the oath works, and it’s not how the military works. You have to read the whole thing in context and in order.

First: support and defend the Constitution.

Second: bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution.

Only then comes: obey the orders of the President and officers, and even that is explicitly “according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

That last clause is the limiter, the legal guardrail. When we swear that oath, we aren’t swearing allegiance to a man, we’re swearing it to the Constitution, and the President’s authority only exists within that structure, not above or beyond it.

The phrase “lawful orders” doesn’t appear in that oath sentence, but it’s all over the law behind it. Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice punishes disobeying a lawful command of a superior commissioned officer. Article 92, the one most of us learned about in basic training, punishes failure to obeylawful general orders and other lawful orders.

The Manual for Courts-Martial makes it clear that orders are presumed lawful, but they are not lawful if they conflict with the Constitution, U.S. statutes or treaties, or exceed the authority of the person giving them. An order that tells you to commit a crime, or to violate rights protected by higher laws, doesn’t magically become legal just because of the rank on the collar of the person giving it. 

Modern JAG guidance and military defense attorneys say the same thing in plainer English,  Articles 90 and 92 only apply if the command was lawful to begin with, and the government has to prove the order itself passes that test. An unlawful order isn’t just “optional.” It literally isn’t an order at all.

And it doesn’t stop there. U.S. military doctrine doesn’t just say you can disobey unlawful orders, it says you must. The DoD’s Law of War Manual and customary international humanitarian law both state that every combatant has a duty to disobey a “manifestly unlawful order.” The Geneva Conventions system and its commentary, which the U.S. has signed onto and incorporated into doctrine, are built around that same idea: “I was just following orders” does not clear you if you knew, or should have known, the order was illegal. That principle was hammered into the record at Nuremberg and later in U.S. cases from Vietnam onward.

And it’s not just enlisted troops. The commissioned officers that we follow take an oath, too, one that doesn’t even include an obedience clause. Officers swear only to support and defend the Constitution and to faithfully discharge their duties. There’s no “obey the president” line anywhere. If anything, their oath draws the boundary even sharper: loyalty to the Constitution over everything and everyone else.

OATH OF COMMISSIONED OFFICERS

I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. 

I don’t have a law degree, but thankfully you don’t need one to understand the basic version of this. No soldier needs a lawyer whispering in their ear to know they can’t shoot unarmed prisoners, target civilians, or “take out their families” because somebody on TV called them terrorists. That “take out their families” line comes directly from Trump, a statement national security people across the spectrum pointed out would be a clear war crime if anyone tried to implement it. 

Same deal when he reportedly floated the idea of U.S. forces shooting migrants in the legs at the southern border to slow them down, or talked about an electrified wall and moats with snakes and alligators. Those proposals were serious enough that White House and DHS officials described them to reporters later, and then had to walk them back. These aren’t just ugly lines from an obviously mentally unstable Commander in Chief. To the people on the sharp end of the spear, they’re the kind of ideas that, if turned into real orders, would shove a platoon leader or squad leader into a direct collision with the laws of war and the Constitution. This is exactly the kind of scenario the “unlawful orders” doctrine exists for. 

Which brings us right back to Mark Kelly. In the video Trump is now raging about, Kelly and other veterans basically said what every one of us who actually served already know: 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. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.

That’s the gist of the 90-second PSA they put out: credentials, oath, reminder about lawful orders, and a closing line: “Don’t give up the ship.” There’s no coded language, no call for a mutiny, no “ignore the president if you don’t like him.” It’s literally standard U.S. military doctrine summarized for social media.

Trump’s response was to call it “seditious behavior, punishable by DEATH!”, demand their arrest, and cheer on an FBI inquiry into six sitting lawmakers, including Kelly. At the Pentagon, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered a “thorough review” of Kelly for potential recall to active duty and court-martial, since as a retired Navy officer he’s still technically subject to the UCMJ.  The FBI has reportedly begun scheduling interviews with the lawmakers as part of a broader sedition-themed fishing expedition. 

Meanwhile, legal experts across the spectrum are saying the obvious: nothing in that video meets the standard for “sedition” under U.S. law. FactCheck.org’s rundown is blunt: the video is an accurate statement of military duty, not an attempt to overthrow the government by force—which is what seditious conspiracy actually means. If you want an example of that, look at the Jan. 6 cases where members of groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting and using force to try to stop the transfer of presidential power.

Other scholars say the same thing: the lawmakers were reiterating that troops must obey lawful orders and refuse unlawful ones, and that is both well-established law and protected speech. The National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force is literally sending out FAQs telling service members, “Yes! All members of the military have the right, and in some cases have the duty, to refuse illegal orders. Your oath is to the Constitution (which incorporates international treaties ratified by the U.S. on human rights and the law of war), not to the Commander-In-Chief or to any other individual in the chain of command.” 

So we’re left with yet another strange upside-down moment in Trump’s authoritarian saga. A group of veterans and national security people reminded troops of the same thing we were all taught: you obey lawful orders, and you can refuse illegal ones. That’s it. There’s no secret code, no revolution, no call to ignore the chain of command because you don’t like the president’s politics. Trump’s answer was to label them “traitors,” talk about the death penalty, and pressure the Pentagon and FBI into investigations that look, to a lot of us, less like protecting “good order and discipline” and more like punishing anyone who stands between him and total personal control of the military.

Of course, Trump has never struck me as an especially bright guy, so maybe part of this is just basic comprehension. Add that to his lack of military service (or his very enthusiastic avoidance of it) and you end up with someone who genuinely seems unable to grasp what the military oath actually says. And like any would-be strongman, he latches onto the part about service members “shall obey the orders of the president” while conveniently ignoring the whole pesky Constitution that keeps getting in his way.

This type of behavior from him is expected at this point. The same can’t be said for Pete Hegseth and the other Trump bootlickers now running the Pentagon—many of whom served, or still serve, and absolutely know better, but they’ve wedged themselves so far up Trump’s backside that they’re now pretending Kelly said something he didn’t and pushing a fake narrative to score political points. It’s pathetic, and they should be embarrassed.

Nothing Kelly said was radical. Nothing he said was partisan. Nothing he said was seditious. It was simply accurate.

As veterans, we all remember this: we raised our right hand and swore to the Constitution first. We don’t swear loyalty to a person. We don’t swear loyalty to a party. And we sure as hell don’t swear loyalty to a man who says he wants “the kind of generals that Hitler had” and then gets angry when people in uniform remember that their job is to defend the law, not his ego.

That’s the point of the oath, and of the Constitution itself: both exist to withstand a moment exactly like this, when a president demands unchecked power he isn’t granted and unquestioning obedience he isn’t owed.

---

Nick Allison is a college dropout, combat veteran, and writer based in Austin, Texas. He spends too much time reading about history, democracy, and systems in collapse—and not enough time being optimistic about any of it. He’s not a journalist or a pundit—just a political independent, unaffiliated with any party, who still believes the Constitution is worth defending. His essays and poems have appeared in HuffPost, CounterPunch, The Chaos Section, The Political Prism, The Shore, New Verse News, and elsewhere. Also, he enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, because it probably makes him feel a little more important than he actually is.