Tuesday, November 25, 2025

The Case Of Sen Kelly

The received opinion, via the Sacramento Bee, goes like this:

Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty. This seems obvious, but on Thursday, Nov. 20, President Donald Trump responded to a video by six members of Congress by posting: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

What did the members of Congress do to deserve this threat of capital punishment? They posted a 90-second video on social media that spoke to members of the military and intelligence communities about their oath to the Constitution. The part of the video that drew Trump’s ire was this remark: “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. ... Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. ... No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

So what is Trump doing here? As I've been saying, it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that he's impulse-driven, unless we attribute considerable discernment to his impulses, which in recent weeks have given him clear victories over the Schumer Shutdown and Rep Taylor Greene. Let's refer once more to the business-school analysis of his negotiating style that I've used in a number of posts here:

My argument is that Trump’s coercive negotiation style is best understood through the prism of his four public roles: observer, performer, controller, and disrupter.

. . . [U]sing observation to facilitate a mutual gains approach is not what Donald Trump has in mind when he prepares for a negotiation. Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent”. . . . He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities.

As much as Trump watches others, he is aware of being watched: “life is a performance art,” he wrote [in] Think Like a Champion.

. . . Trump’s fighting style has received considerable attention: “That’s just my makeup,” he explained in The Art of the Deal. “I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky”. “I love fighting … battles,” Trump said recently.

. . . Trump the disrupter is instinct‐driven. “Listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper”. He repeated this advice ten years later. “The chosen few,” he wrote, “can just go with their gut”. Trump the disrupter is also action‐oriented: “If you’re going to achieve anything, you have to take action”.

The congresspeople who posted the video urging military members not to follow "illegal" orders was tailor-made for Trump's strategy. He immediately jumped on it in his roles as performer and disrupter:

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET,” the president wrote in one Truth Social post Thursday morning (Nov 20), linking to an article about the video from the Washington Examiner.

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” Trump wrote in another post.

In a third, he wrote: "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"

But it's worth pointing out that Trump as observer had already been at work. The Democrat who had the most to lose in making the video was Sen Mark Kelly:

Because Kelly was a senior officer who retired from the Navy, he is required to remain available for recall to the military by law. The other five lawmakers, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan, are not eligible for recall to a military service.

The recall can also be for the purpose of court martial for violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to which Kelly continues to be subject as a retiree. Kelly issued a bombastic reply:

When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired – which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

Sec Hegseth replied, Intriguingly, legacy media hasn't been giving the other Democrats an easy ride:

Slotkin faced questions during an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the recent reaction to a social media video she and five other Democratic lawmakers made encouraging service members to "refuse illegal orders."

"Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?" host Martha Raddatz asked.

"To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela," Slotkin responded.

Elsewhere,

NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday asked [Sen Amy] Klobuchar what specific “illegal acts” the seditious Democrats were referring to in the viral video.

“I wonder, do you know what the specific, illegal acts are that your democratic colleagues were referring to there?” Kristen Welker asked Klobuchar.

Klobuchar could not answer Welker.

. . . “If their commander were to tell them, hey go out on the streets… and do this and that, that’s not following the order that is in law,” Klobuchar said.

The allegations against Kelly are beginning to push other Democrats over the edge. Arizona Sen Ruben Gallego posted a video while driving:

This is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. Hey, this is Ruben Gallego, I’m traveling through Arizona right now, and I just see the news that Department of Defense is starting investigation against my seat mate, Mark Kelly. this is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. And, you know, these guys are trying to say that they’re not acting like fascists, they’re not trying to give as much power to this president as a king, that they should stop acting like it.

Trump as observer, performer, controller, and disrupter has deliberately provoked a donnybrook, the sort of thing that by his own admission he loves. And although he made his initial allegations with characteristic hyperbole and bravado, there's substance behind them, as former CIA operations officer Bryan Dean Wright pointed out to Jesse Waters:

[I]f you watch the video again, one of the first things that [Sen Slotkin] and the others do is they establish credibility and authority. They talk about who they are, working for the CIA and working for the military. They then move into the next phase of the propaganda message, which is, there’s a crisis. They create a crisis for the listeners inside the FBI and the CIA and the military, and they say that there is a threat, not just abroad, like we might face with China or Russia or al-Qaeda, but inside of the country. The threat is here. Who’s that threat? Donald Trump.

It looks like there might be serious grounds for a court martial for Sen Kelly in this case. I keep saying over and over that it's a big mistake to underestimate Trump. And let's face it, he's enjoying himself doing this. No wonder he doesn't take a salary.

posted by test @ November 25, 2025   0 Comments