US generals and admirals now weighing how to respond when Trump issues illegal orders

Historian Sean Wilentz and former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal have some keen insights on the rapid deterioration of civil-military relations under Trump, in a YouTube video posted by Legal AF on Sunday evening.

Wilentz and Blumenthal agree that the generals and admirals summoned to Quantico to listen to Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth did so with disciplined contempt, that left Trump infuriated.  Wilentz and Blumenthal also agree that Trump’s visit to the Norfolk naval base and his “rally” on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H.W. Bush was Trump’s response to the disastrous Quantico meeting.

Most important, I believe, is the reaction of the generals and admirals, who are now weighing their options in how to respond when Trump issues orders that the generals and admirals know will be unconstitutional and illegal. 

At 1:42, Blumenthal states that “it appears that the entire senior leadership of the US military has reached a quiet understanding that Trump is engaged in postconstitutional behavior that endangers their role and they are thinking about what they might be called upon to do by the president.”

Wilentz and Blumenthal also agreed that Trump and Hegseth decided to call all the nation’s top military officers to the meeting in Quantico after it became clear that the military leaders were uniformly rejecting the new Annual Defense Strategic Review, which has been circulated to the officers but not yet publicly released.