“I was only following orders”

The man indicted for fomenting an insurrection in his plot to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021 is trying to redefine sedition and patriotism. And rather than seeking jail time for his critics, he’s calling for their execution.

As Donald Trump sinks deeper and deeper into a physical and mental decline — and faces the cold, hard reality that dictatorship is the only way to stay in office after January 20, 2029 — he is unleashing an increasingly preposterous stream of bile.

Aided and abetted by his favorite propaganda outlet.

In a week where he had already condoned the dismemberment of a journalist and demeaned a living woman reporter as “piggy,” Trump upped the ante in trying to change the subject from his loss of the Epstein Files narrative.

And what better way than for a man who avoided military service because of “bone spurs” — and who called avoiding sexually transmitted diseases his “personal Vietnam” — than to call out men and women who honorably served in the military or intelligence services for telling the truth.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly prohibits orders that “without such a valid military purpose, interfere with private rights or personal affairs.”

It reflects a clear rejection of the defense offered by Nazi soldiers at the Nuremberg Trials that they “were only following orders.”

That was the intent of the message of six Democrats in a video that included Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who served in the Navy.

“Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

The issue takes on greater meaning as the American military has been called out to patrol the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and after Trump suggested in a speech to military leaders that they can use Americans cities as a “training ground.”

Actions which appear to violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that limits the federal government from using the military to enforce domestic laws absent invocation of the Insurrection Act.

At the same time, Trump and Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth are waging an undeclared and likely illegal war against “narco-terrorists” in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean.

It’s enough to make good soldiers worry about their own culpability.

But not according to President Bone Spurs, who took to his personal social media site, Lie Antisocial, to spew:

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL”

“Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He later added that the behavior was “punishable by DEATH!” and reshared a post proclaiming: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

This from a government that wasn’t sure swastikas are hate symbols.

Naturally his minions, starting with Propaganda Minister Karoline Leavitt, were quick to back him up:

“I’m not a lawyer. I’ll leave that to the Department of Justice and the Department of War to decide,” she said, going on to say that “every single order that is given to this United States military by this commander in chief and through this command chain of command, through the Secretary of War, is lawful.

“If this were Republican members of Congress who were encouraging members of the military and members of our United States government to defy orders from the president and from the chain of command, this entire room would be up in arms. But instead it is the other way around, and I think that’s quite telling.”

She should have quit after than first sentence.

The targeted Democrats responded:

“What’s most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our service members should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.”

The manufactured outrage has stepped up safety threats to lawmakers who already survived the assault of hundreds of insurrectionists who descended on Washington and built a gallows outside the Capitol in following their leader’s promise that it “will be wild.”

But perhaps just as pathetic is the silence — or the blind loyalty of Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Trump Toady — who were outraged, I tell you outraged, that Democrats didn’t vociferously condemn political violence after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Johnson placed blame on, you guessed it, the Democrats, insisting Trump was simply “defining the crime of sedition.”

Actually, the crime is best defined by the convictions of Oath Keeper Steward Rhodes and Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio on charges of seditious conspiracy related to January 6th.

Convictions for which Trump pardoned them.

You can say they were also only following orders.