# Donald Trump — "Seditious behavior, punishable by DEATH!" > [!quote] "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." > — Donald Trump, Truth Social, November 20, 2025 > [!quote] "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" > — Donald Trump, Truth Social, November 20, 2025 (follow-up post) Trump also reposted a Truth Social user's reply that read: "Hang them [[George Washington]] would." ## Context On November 18, 2025, six Democratic members of Congress — all veterans of the U.S. military or U.S. intelligence services — released a coordinated video reminding active-duty service members and intelligence officers that they are not legally required to carry out unlawful orders. The lawmakers were: - Sen. [[Mark Kelly]] (D-AZ) — retired Navy combat pilot and astronaut - Sen. [[Elissa Slotkin]] (D-MI) — former CIA analyst and Pentagon official - Rep. [[Jason Crow]] (D-CO) — former Army Ranger - Rep. [[Chris Deluzio]] (D-PA) — Navy veteran - Rep. [[Chrissy Houlahan]] (D-PA) — [[Air Force]] veteran - Rep. [[Maggie Goodlander]] (D-NH) — Navy intelligence reservist The 90-second video, titled "Don't Give Up the Ship," was posted to Sen. Slotkin's social-media accounts on November 18, 2025. (An earlier version of this page listed Rep. Pat Ryan among the six; the sixth lawmaker was Rep. Chris Deluzio — corrected 2026-06-22.) The content of the video was a restatement of black-letter law: the Uniform Code of Military Justice (Article 90 / Article 92), the Nuremberg Principles, and decades of military legal training all establish that service members have an affirmative duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders. Nothing in the video named Trump, named any specific order, or urged any specific defiance. Two days later — November 20, 2025 — Trump posted the response above on Truth Social, in a series of escalating posts that explicitly called for the death penalty against sitting members of Congress for the act of stating military law to military personnel. The Defense Department subsequently opened a UCMJ "review" of Sen. Kelly. Senate Minority Leader [[Chuck Schumer]] responded that Trump "is lighting a match in a country soaked with political gasoline." ## Why this matters This is the most concentrated single moment of the **inversion pattern** that this collection documents. **1. The video stated military law. Trump called stating military law a capital crime.** The lawmakers told service members to obey the law. Trump's response was that telling service members to obey the law is "seditious." Inverted from any honest description of the underlying speech act, the only coherent reading is that Trump was telling service members the existence of unlawful orders is the seditious idea — that the chain of command, not the law, is the legal rule. This is the definitional move of authoritarianism. **2. "Domestic terrorist" rhetoric is the surface; "punishable by death" is the floor.** Across 2024–2026 the administration and its allies have repeatedly labeled the Democratic Party, antifa, and progressive NGOs as "domestic terrorist organizations" or "domestic extremist organizations" (see [[Stephen Miller - domestic extremist organization]]; [[Donald Trump - antifa terrorist designation]]). The Mark Kelly post is what that frame authorizes when the speaker drops the euphemism: not legal designation, not normal prosecution, but execution by the state as a partisan tool against the legislature. **3. Sitting senator. Active military veteran. Capital threat.** This was not directed at a marginal activist or an anonymous opponent. The president of the United States publicly called for the execution of a sitting U.S. senator who is also a Navy combat veteran, for the offense of reminding service members that they are not required to commit war crimes. There is no contemporary precedent in American history for a sitting president publicly demanding the execution of a sitting member of the opposing party for a speech act. **4. The reposting of "Hang them George Washington would" is the stochastic mechanism.** Trump did not need to issue a direct kill order. The death-penalty post plus the reposted lynching framing functions as permission and target-marking — the formal definition of [[Stochastic Terrorism]]. Everything that follows in terms of threats, doxxing, and individual violence has been authorized by this post. ## Verification - **Primary source**: Truth Social posts, November 20, 2025. Multiple posts that day; the "punishable by DEATH" line was a follow-up to the longer "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL" post. Both archived by NBC News, ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and others. - **Wording verified across**: NBC News, ABC News, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Cronkite News (Arizona PBS), Michigan Advance, Al Jazeera, Snopes — all reproduce identical text. - **Legal experts on the sedition claim**: PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and contemporary legal commentary uniformly rejected the sedition framing. The federal seditious-conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. § 2384) requires conspiring to overthrow or oppose by force the authority of the government. Telling soldiers to obey military law is not a 2384 violation under any reading. - **DoD review of Sen. Kelly**: Confirmed via [[Democracy Docket]] and contemporaneous reporting; an extraordinary action against a sitting senator for protected speech. ## Related quotes - [[Donald Trump - enemy from within]] — Oct 2024 framing that set up the November 2025 capital threat. - [[Donald Trump - Liz Cheney nine barrels]] — earlier execution-imagery directed at a specific Republican target. - [[Stephen Miller - domestic extremist organization]] — the institutional version of the labeling move. ## Part of collections - [[Violence Inversion Rhetoric]] - [[Might Makes Right Doctrine]]