Donald Trump Orders the Military to Attack!

Would the generals follow orders to attack Greenland or the Panama Canal?

Now that mainstream media (MSM) have seen the consequences of their relentless attacks on a has-been personality like Donald Trump – unnecessary exaggerations about his amateurish coup attempt in 2020; the whole Russiagate scandal done without an apology; covering up Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline when they must have known all along; mostly blaming him for a botched Covid-19 response even though he enabled a fairly quick and largely successful vaccination development; siding with a legal theory in New York State that turned misdemeanors into felonies; blaming the “Trump tariffs” for much of our recent inflation though they were a reaction to China’s constant cheating and thefts; largely pretending there was no crisis at the southern border, thereby delivering that issue to him and virtually guaranteeing his November 2024 election victory; and more – essentially turning him into some kind of martyr or conquering hero, how will they report on his fantastic threats to attack property of a NATO member and a friendly Central American country? There is no chance Trump’s base will believe anything the MSM now says, and this time we really, really should be afraid.

George W. Bush got us involved in a war in Iraq that only benefitted Iran, as some observers in the US and the UK noted at the time, but the MSM nevertheless mostly went along with the scenario. Dwight David Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and especially Lyndon Johnson got us involved in Vietnam, which led to media scrutiny largely only when the war dragged on and protests mounted. In both cases this was done without a Declaration of War that only Congress can issue. Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to Congress after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to get a Declaration of War – he did not act unilaterally. But at least Saddam Hussein was a real menace in Iraq, and “the domino theory” of Communist expansion as it applied to Vietnam was not totally without merit.

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But what Trump is threatening is sheer madness without an iota of legitimacy; any rationale he’s giving can be achieved by peaceful means and negotiation. He really is starting to sound like what his most severe critics have been warning us about. By making the threat to take over other areas by force (in the name of national security) he hardly differentiates himself from someone like Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese leaders who violently took over Tibet in the 1950s.

So, what if he actually told our generals and admirals to attack Greenland or Panama? Some think it’s all bluster and we should be no more than embarrassed by this, that it’s the same old, same old Donald establishing his negotiating position. Well, what if he really means it, and what if he really orders the military brass to do it?

Would they follow a patently illegal order? Would they have to follow such orders regardless?

Here’s what I found on an independent military website that addresses this issue:

This tension is resolved by rules contained in the Manual for Courts Martial. The manual is an executive order that augments the Uniform Code of Military Justice by setting forth procedural rules and providing guidance based on case law for interpreting the code. Rule 916(d) of the Manual for Courts Martial says:

It is a defense to any offense that the accused was acting pursuant to orders unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.

Most of us are not lawyers and there would be plenty of precedents and case studies to review before we could definitively say officers should not follow orders to attack Greenland or Panama even if they came directly from the Commander in Chief. We also would have to hope that the top brass would be brave enough to sacrifice their careers, either by refusing orders or, more likely, resigning before they would be forced to carry them out. But in the common sense understanding of the legal instruction above we all do know that the generals and admirals should refuse to follow such orders. That would lead to a terrible constitutional crisis, I know. But following such an order would mean the end of the United States Constitution and, consequently, the end of the United States of America.