The Catch-22 around Trump’s illegal orders | Will Bunch Newsletter

There’s an old saying — well, there ought to be one — that the surest way to jinx something is to write, “I don’t want to jinx it...” My Border Patrol tornado-chasing trip to Charlotte was doomed the moment I posted about it here — frantically canceled when I learned 17 hours before takeoff that the BP had abruptly ditched North Carolina. There is a Plan B but no way will I jinx it a second time.

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A U.S. Army helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson Jr. may be the greatest American hero you’ve probably never heard of. On March 16, 1968, Thompson — a warrant officer serving in Vietnam — and his crew were dispatched to support a “search and destroy” mission supposedly targeting the Viet Cong in a tiny hamlet called My Lai.

Instead, the Georgia-born soldier came up upon arguably the most notorious war crime in U.S. history — with thatch hutches ablaze and countless villagers, including women and children, laying dead or dying in an irrigation ditch.

Thompson landed and found the commander on the ground, Lt. William Calley. “What is this?” he asked. “Who are these people?”

“Just following orders,” Calley replied. After some more back and forth, the flustered Thompson replied: “But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.”

What Thompson and his helicopter crew did next was truly remarkable. Holding Calley and their other U.S. comrades at bay, they shielded a group of Vietnamese women, children and old men as they fled. Eventually, he loaded 11 villagers into the helicopter, and then Thompson and his men thought they detected movement in the ditch. Two fellow solders found a boy, just 5 or 6, hiding under the corpses, “covered in blood and obviously in a state of shock.” After safely evacuating the boy to a military hospital, Thompson reached a lieutenant colonel who ordered Calley to stop the killings.

Near the end of his life, Thompson — who died in 2006 — and two comrades were recognized for their courage and the many lives they saved at My Lai, awarded the Army’s highest award for bravery not in conflict with an enemy (the Soldier’s Medal), as well as the the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award. He even returned to My Lai for an emotional reunion in 1998.

But it wasn’t like that in real time. During the war, a prominent congressman demanded that Thompson be court-martialed. “I’d received death threats over the phone,” he told CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2004. “Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up.”

A generation after Thompson’s death, the kind of bold action he took that day in 1968 — disobeying what he correctly understood as an illegal order — is yet again on America’s front burner. This time, the debate is fueled by a video from six veterans who now serve as Democrats in Congress ― reminding today’s soldiers about their sworn duty to disobey unlawful commands.

That every expert in military law agrees with this principle hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump or his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, from going ballistic — calling the Democrats “traitors” or even reposting calls for their death by hanging.

On Monday, Hegseth kicked things up a notch by endorsing a plan for one of the six — Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and decorated Navy fighter pilot — to return to active duty, so that he can be court-martialed for taking part in the video. A statement from the Pentagon, which Trump and Hegseth call “the Department of War,” insisted that “orders are presumed to be lawful. A servicemember’s personal philosophy does not justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”

Even as the growing controversy dominates the headlines, there is one aspect to the illegal-orders debate that practically no one is talking about. Actions like Thompson’s refusal at My Lai don’t only stand out for the soldier’s gumption. It is also the stuff of peace prizes and 60 Minutes profiles because it is so incredibly rare.

Do your own research. It’s very difficult to find examples in America’s 249-year history of troops disobeying orders because they are believed to be illegal. To be sure, there are famous incidents of soldiers who disobeyed an order and heroically saved lives — but almost all of them were because the command was reckless or just plain stupid, which isn’t the same as illegal or unconstitutional.

It’s not like there haven’t been opportunities. There have been American war crimes from Wounded Knee to Abu Ghraib, what Barack Obama famously called “dumb wars” like the 2003 assault on Iraq, and moments of intense moral agony, like dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These did produce a few whistleblowers or conscientious objectors, of course, but cases of actually refusing an order are few.

It’s not hard to understand why. Most military orders — even ones later reviled by history — come with some veneer of legality, whether it’s an opinion from a military lawyer or a congressional authorization vote, as happened with Vietnam, Iraq, and other conflicts.

The video recorded by Kelly and the others (including Pennsylvania Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio) focuses only on the widely accepted principle that military men and women must follow the law and the Constitution above all else, and doesn’t mention Trump or any specific disputed orders. In interviews, though, Democrats like Kelly and Houlahan have criticized Trump’s ongoing attacks on boats off South America that the regime claims are smuggling drugs.

While almost every expert on military laws describes these attacks — which have killed at least 83 people— as extrajudicial killings lacking legal justification, the Office of Legal Counsel in Trump’s Justice Department has nonetheless written a secret classified memo to justify them. Any officer or lower-level troop ordered to blow up these boats and kill all the people on board hasn’t seen the memo. And they won’t get a medal for saying “no” — at least not in 2025. They will be court-martialed and vilified by MAGA.

New York Times opinion writer David French, a Harvard Law grad who served as an Army lawyer in Iraq, notes the congressional video didn’t advise troops on what exactly is an illegal order, and adds: “Individual service members don’t have sufficient knowledge or information to make those kinds of judgments. When time is of the essence and lives are on the line, your first impulse must be to do as you’re told.”

Not always, as Thompson showed at My Lai, but military matters are rarely that black and white. The Trump regime’s sending of National Guard units and even active-duty military into cities such as Los Angeles may be an unnecessary and inflammatory violation of democratic norms, but experienced judges continue to debate its legality. Expecting the rank-and-file troops to decide is asking a lot.

It is very much in the spirit of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel and its legendary Catch-22: A soldier must disobey an illegal order, yet orders, in the heat of the moment, are almost never illegal.

That doesn’t mean Trump and Hegseth threatening Kelly and the other Democrats with jail and possibly the noose isn’t utterly outrageous. After all, they did nothing more than remind soldiers of their obligation to the law in the same language their drill sergeants use in boot camp.

I do also think — understanding the limitations of a MAGA-fed Congress — that good people of both parties on Capitol Hill should be doing a lot more to invoke the War Powers Act, hold hearings, debate impeachment, and do whatever else they can to prevent Trump’s reckless acts in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In other words, stop illegal orders before they’re given.

That said, as the Trump regime deteriorates, there may come a day when right and wrong feels as obvious as it did that 1968 day in the rice paddies of Vietnam. If, heaven forbid, this government ever ordered troops to put down a protest by firing on citizens, we will need a platoon full of Hugh Thompsons and no William Calleys, “just following orders.”

Question: Why is the Trump administration uncritically regurgitating the Russian “peace plan”? — @kaboosemoose.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: That’s a great question as our president has consistently told us that the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” scandal around Vladimir Putin’s U.S. election interference and his seeming sway over the 45th and 47th president is all a massive hoax. How to explain, then, that the supposedly-Trump-drafted 28-point peace plan to end the fighting in Ukraine was translated from its original Russian, with its details hashed out in Florida by corrupt and contented Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S.-sanctioned Russian envoy? It’s probably true that liberals were naive during Trump’s first term to believe the strange ties between MAGA and the Kremlin would bring down his presidency, but it’s also true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We all want peace in Ukraine, but Trump and his U.S. government simply are not honest brokers.

Last week’s question about the Jeffrey Epstein files, and whether they’ll ever see the light of day despite enactment of the law calling for their release, was kind of open-ended, and thus it drew an array of responses. But most agreed with my view that it’s highly unlikely we’ll see the files, or see very much. “They won’t release them because they are now investigating the Democrats in the files, thus they won’t be able to release them due to the investigation,” Rosann McGinley wrote. “Also they’d be heavily redacted, ‘nothing to see here.’” Added Judy Voois: “I would not be surprised if he declared war on Venezuela just to steer the media and public interest away from continued scrutiny of the Epstein saga.”

📮 This week’s question: The heated reaction I received online about the JFK assassination now has me wondering what newsletter readers think. Do you believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone killer of John F. Kennedy, or do you think there was a conspiracy? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “JFK assassination” in the subject line.

Saturday was the 62nd anniversary of the JFK assassination, but on Nov. 22, 2025 it was the entire planet that was under fire. One researcher declared that globally it was the hottest Nov. 22 ever recorded. It didn’t feel that way at my windswept dog park in Delco, but it did from the American Southeast — experiencing a record heat wave — to Tehran, where an epic drought has seen water fountains run dry. And yet the world’s leaders were on a full-fledged retreat from climate action, from the White House, where U.S. CEOs toasted the oil dictatorship of Saudi Arabia at a posh dinner, to Brazil, where a global summit on climate change failed to take on the hegemony of fossil fuels, to Harrisburg.

In a state that’s kowtowed to Big Oil and Gas interests since the days of John D. Rockefeller, Pennsylvania Republicans used the shame of the nation’s longest state-budget impasse to finally ram home their most cherished agenda item: gutting efforts in the Keystone State to work with our neighbors to control the greenhouse-gas pollution behind climate change. The GOP-run state Senate backed Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro into a corner. Pennsylvania had to withdraw from Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a regional pollution-control system, or the money wouldn’t resume flowing to schools and other vital services.

To be clear, the drivers of this giant step backward were state lawmakers who’ve been swimming in Big Oil’s tainted campaign cash for a couple of decades now. But the capitulation, even at political gunpoint, was not Shapiro’s finest hour — especially as the Democrat with apparent ambition for higher office continues to push for polluting and energy-devouring data centers that he claims will boost the economy. As the American Prospect noted in a new piece, Pennsylvania’s environmental retreat came at the same time Virginia was electing a Democratic governor in Abigail Spanberger who’d promised to restore her state to the RGGI. If Shapiro does run for president in 2028, he may struggle to explain this deal to climate-minded voters.

The real problem, though, is that the best way to tackle climate change is by going on offense, with aggressive programs to promote alternative energy such as wind (there seems to be a lot of that around here) and solar that aren’t not only cleaner but a better deal for beleaguered consumers. While Pennsylvania — second only to Texas in natural-gas production — went all in on fracking, a 2024 survey found the commonwealth was 49th on expanding wind power and energy efficiency. With RGGI in the rearview mirror, the Shapiro administration needs to work a lot harder on green energy. That would be good for our governor’s White House dreams, but it would be a lot better for the planet.

In the late fall of 2020, when I wasn’t trying to warn people that Donald Trump was planning a coup, I turned my attention to the incoming president, Joe Biden — and it’s both fascinating and sad to read how naive we were in the giddy aftermath of Trump’s defeat. In writing about Biden’s early Cabinet picks, the subhead read: “America is seeing the start of something it’s not used to: A White House that’s experienced, qualified ... and boring. Could Biden’s ploy work?” NO! The answer turned out to be “no.” But still read the rest: “Biden’s Cabinet is ‘delightfully boring.’ Can reality-TV-addled America deal with it?”

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