Whistleblower fuels concerns of rogue military under Trump in 2025

Remarks from a Washington, DC National Guard whistleblower this month have raised fresh concerns that the US military may go rogue against President Trump should he retake the White House in 2025.

Pentagon officials stripped Trump of authority in 2021

Colonel Earl Matthews told the Daily Mail this month that in 2021 Pentagon officials effectively stripped President Trump of his authority as commander-in-chief. At the time, Matthews served in a legal advisory role as a staff judge advocate.

According to Matthews, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy plotted to disregard orders from Trump after January 6th, 2021. They “unreasonably” believed Trump would order the DC National Guard to intervene with the certification of the election results. Matthews testified about these matters before Congress as a whistleblower in April.

“Army leadership had unreasonably anticipated an ‘unlawful order’”

“I think a very plausible argument can be made that, through no fault of his own, President Trump’s command authority over both the D.C. National Guard and the U.S. Army itself had been surreptitiously curtailed by the senior leadership of the Army on January 6, 2021,” said Matthews.

He continued: “Army leadership had unreasonably anticipated an ‘unlawful order’ from the President, an order that the President had no plans to issue, and were preemptively seeking to curtail his discretion to issue such an order.”

Matthews’ version of events aligns with that of others. In the book Peril, journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write that on January 8th Milley held a secret meeting at the Pentagon. In the meeting, Milley instructed senior officials in the National Military Command Center to refuse orders from the president unless he, Milley, approved. This included, Milley clarified, orders concerning the nuclear arsenal.

According to the New York Times, the meeting came after Milley received a call from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was looking for a way to “have the Pentagon leadership essentially remove Mr. Trump from his authorities as the commander in chief.”

DC network priming military to “foil” Trump's “unlawful orders”

Although Milley has retired, reports suggest that current officials may be planning to follow in his footsteps if Trump retakes the White House next year, requiring the military to ignore certain potential orders by deeming them “illegal” or claiming them to be an “expansion” of powers.

NBC reported in January that “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater to his political needs.”

The report also hinted that members of the military are being conditioned to refuse orders from Trump if they are “illegal”:

The military’s role is unique in that soldiers and sailors are trained to obey the commander-in-chief but are told not to follow illegal orders.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) was quoted as saying that the United States can survive a Trump presidency if “the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order.”

In the meantime, politicians like Blumenthal are working to make Trump’s agenda unlawful. Blumenthal, for instance, is trying to pass a bill that would forbid a withdrawal from NATO, a move Trump has openly supported.