# Donald Trump — Truth Social, November 20, 2025 — "punishable by DEATH" The **series of Truth Social posts Donald Trump published on November 20, 2025**, in which he called six Democratic veteran and intelligence-community lawmakers' conduct "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" and reposted other users' lynching imagery. The posts were not deleted. This file captures the posts as artifact — the multi-post structure, the repost mechanism, and the institutional fallout. The paired Quote file [[Donald Trump - seditious behavior punishable by death]] carries the verbatim text and the speech-act analysis. ## Artifact properties | Property | Value | |---|---| | Posted | 2025-11-20 (Thursday) | | Deleted | No — left up | | Account | `@realDonaldTrump`, Truth Social | | Structure | Multiple posts that day + reposts of other users | | Media type | Text (original posts) + reposts | | Trigger | "Don't Give Up the Ship" video, posted Nov 18, 2025 | | Walkback | Nov 21, 2025 — "I'm not threatening death... In the old days, if you said a thing like that, that was punishable by death" | ## What was posted Across November 20, 2025, Trump posted a sequence on Truth Social. The two load-bearing posts: - A longer post: "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." - A follow-up, in full: "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" He also **reposted** a Truth Social user's reply reading "Hang them [[George Washington]] would." The repost is structurally important: it is the amplification mechanism that converts the president's own (arguably deniable) "punishable by death" framing into explicit, target-marked lynching advocacy carried under his account. ## The post as a distinct artifact (vs. the Quote) The Quote file is optimized for the verbatim utterance. This Social Post entry exists because three of the consequential properties are about the post-as-object, not the words: **1. The repost is the artifact.** "Hang them George Washington would" is not Trump's utterance — it is something he chose to amplify. That curation decision (whose post, when, under what account) is a property of the post-object, the kind of structural fact this folder is for. It is the precise mechanism of [[Stochastic Terrorism]]: not a direct order, but permission plus target-marking. **2. It was a multi-post sequence, not one quote.** The "punishable by DEATH" line reads as a stray quote in isolation; as an artifact it was an escalating same-day thread, which is what made outlets treat it as a sustained threat rather than a slip. **3. The post stayed up through the institutional response.** Unlike the deleted AI-Jesus image, these posts were never removed — including after the Defense Department opened a UCMJ "review" of Sen. [[Mark Kelly]] and after the FBI requested interviews with all six lawmakers (NPR, Nov 26). The post's persistence through that escalation is itself the record. ## Fallout arc - **Nov 18, 2025** — Six Democratic lawmakers (Kelly, [[Elissa Slotkin]], [[Jason Crow]], [[Chris Deluzio]], [[Chrissy Houlahan]], [[Maggie Goodlander]]) release the "Don't Give Up the Ship" video reminding service members they may refuse illegal orders. - **Nov 20, 2025** — Trump's "seditious behavior, punishable by DEATH" posts + the "Hang them" repost. - **Nov 21, 2025** — Trump tells reporters he "wasn't threatening death," reframing it as a historical observation ("In the old days..."). - **Late Nov 2025** — Defense Department opens a review of Sen. Kelly; the FBI requests interviews with all six lawmakers. Legal experts (PolitiFact, FactCheck.org) reject the sedition framing: encouraging refusal of *illegal* orders is not seditious conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. § 2384. ## Related entries - [[Donald Trump - seditious behavior punishable by death]] — the paired receipts-style Quote (verbatim text, legal analysis) - [[Truth Social]] — the venue - [[Stochastic Terrorism]] — the mechanism the repost enacts - [[Mark Kelly]] — the named target who drew a DoD review ## Followup TODOs - **Capture archive_url** — Wayback / archive.today snapshots of the original posts and the "Hang them" repost while they remain live. - **Capture a screenshot** of the post sequence into `/imgs/` and embed. - **Track the FBI inquiry** — does it advance, and does any of the six face formal action?