Gov. Wes Moore was in his happy place — on a national news program.
He told MSNBC host Jen Psaki about a text message from someone he served with in the Army, lamenting the difficulty serving an unnervingly erratic commander-in-chief, Donald Trump.
“And he said to me, it’s normal to disagree with the commander-in-chief. But I don’t want to be embarrassed by him. And he said, ‘I’m embarrassed.’”
Understandable. This was a day after the president told a rare gathering of top generals and admirals in Virginia that they could use American cities as a stand-in for foreign enemies.
“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control,” Trump said.
What Moore said next feels like almost as dangerous a fantasy — that the military might save the republic from becoming a military dictatorship by disobeying a presidential order.
“They’re figuring right now, we will follow the commands of our commander in chief,” Moore said. “That’s the oath we took, when they’re lawful.”
I keep waiting for Democrats heading into the 2026 midterms to unite behind the slogan, “Impeach Trump. Third time’s the charm.”
That’s what it may take to end this insanity.
Because if Moore’s friend — God help him if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth roots out his identity — is struggling with questionably lawful orders, there is almost zero chance he will disobey.
The military is not coming to save America, even one where the president indulges in flights of fantasy so absurd that they raise questions about his grip on reality.
“In the book I wrote — whatever the hell, the title, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and you gotta take care of him,“ Trump told sailors Oct. 5 in a celebration of the Navy’s 250th anniversary.
”They didn’t do it. A year later, he blew up the World Trade Center. So we gotta take a little credit ‘cause nobody else is gonna give it to me.”
Nowhere in “The America We Deserve” did Trump warn about bin Laden, who was killed by Navy SEALS in Pakistan in 2011.
Being good sailors, the Navy audience cheered the president’s delusions.
They won’t disobey his orders.
Dennis Murphy, an Annapolis attorney who served as the judge advocate general officer on the Naval Academy superintendent’s staff in the late 1980s, said the idea is almost a fantasy of its own.
“It would be rare, even maybe unprecedented, for an officer to disobey an order from the president,” he said.
A few generals tried it — Douglas MacArthur in Korea and George B. McClellan in the Civil War. Both were fired.
The military runs on orders, most so routine that 99.9% are obeyed without much thought.
If the president asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send troops to Baltimore, he would turn to one of the five senior JAG officers to clarify any doubts about legality.
Trump appointed the current top JAGs, an unprecedented shake-up that raises lots of red flags. They would pass their legal advice down to junior JAGs at different commands.
For an officer in one of those commands to disobey that guidance, the order would have to be so outrageous it would make the risk of imprisonment acceptable.
Because the belief that an order is illegal might not be a defense.
“It would have to be something obviously in violation of the law, not something open to interpretation,” Murphy said.
The classic example is William Calley, an Army lieutenant who led the torture and murder of hundreds of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Calley argued at his court-martial that he was following orders.
The Army denied it, but the court ruled that any such orders would be “manifestly unlawful” — the legal test today for disobedience.
Sending the military into cities, the crisis Trump created, is open to interpretation.
“It may be true that they need help with crime, but is that the role of the military?” Murphy said. “It’s unclear.”
Judges in California, Oregon and Illinois have paused Trump’s orders to put National Guard units on the streets.
They’ve been skeptical of the reasons given for those orders — that troops are needed to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they carry out the president’s roundup of immigrants for deportation.
There’s consistent reporting out of Los Angeles and Chicago that any chaos is a consequence of super-aggressive tactics. ICE is disregarding public safety and legal rights, giving Trump the excuse he wants to use the military to quell dissent.
The U.S. Supreme Court, where all this will likely end, has been the president’s partner in pretty much everything he’s wanted so far.
Until then, Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, another 19th-century law that allows a president to use military force to police and arrest citizens in times of rebellion.
“Well, it’s been invoked before,” he said Tuesday.
He made the same threat five years ago, during the protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd. Department of Defense leaders talked him out of it, but they didn’t disobey.
With far more compliant advisors now, Trump’s use of the act could be the crucible where officers’ fealty to their oath is tested.
“And that puts the members of our military in a really complicated situation,” said Moore, who served as an Army captain in Afghanistan.
I wanted to ask Moore about his comments on disobedience, but his office didn’t respond. He can drop a thought bomb on MSNBC, but he owes Maryland further explanation when the idea is so controversial.
If the military is the only thing that can stop Trump from shredding the Constitution, the cure might be worse than the disease.
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