Why I Believe Most American Generals Are Pushing Back Against Trump 2.0
- john raymond
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Contemporary assessments of President Trump’s responsiveness to advice misconstrue the mechanism of his rhetorical mimicry. He is not genuinely shaped by the “last person in the room,” nor does he authentically integrate professional counsel.
Instead, he steals concepts — borrows moral framings articulated by others, particularly those grounded in constitutional or ethical restraint, and rebrands them as his own. Within the civil-military domain, this dynamic has surfaced most clearly in his interaction with American generals and the broader debate over obedience to lawful versus unlawful orders.
When generals and legal authorities anchor their pushback in constitutional oaths and professional moral codes, Trump does not acknowledge the institutional legitimacy of those constraints; he recasts those constraints in personalistic, subjective language in an attempt to absorb the authority behind them and neutralize the institution’s normative power.
Institutional Constraint vs. Concept Theft
In a widely reported interview with The New York Times, President Trump explicitly claimed that legal obligations such as “international law” are not necessary constraints on his use of power, and that the only limit on his authority is “my own morality, my own mind,” adding “it’s the only thing that can stop me.” He further qualified even international law as dependent on its definition.
This rhetorical assertion is significant not because it is a literal operational doctrine, but because it reveals a pattern in Trump’s engagement with constraints: when external legal and institutional frameworks are in tension with his and Putin’s ambitions, he reframes them as optional and up to his personal judgment. His language is deliberately individualistic and disconnected from the intersubjective, rule-based character of law.
Independent of this interview, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds produced a public message exhorting service members that they “must refuse illegal orders,” a statement grounded in longstanding military legal doctrine that unlawful orders (particularly manifestly unlawful ones) are not to be obeyed and that service members have a duty to disobey them.
Law experts affirm that U.S. military personnel historically and legally may refuse unlawful orders; this is embedded in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and has been upheld in military jurisprudence. Trump’s response to this message was to denounce it as “sedition,” threaten severe legal repercussions, and support actions that could demote military-veteran lawmakers who participated in it.
Viewed together, these are not isolated rhetorical spikes; they are part of a broader pattern in which President Trump encounters an institutional constraint grounded in law or professional ethics, and instead of engaging with the institutional logic behind those constraints, he recasts them in personal terms that effectively strip them of their shared, moral and rule-based authority.
What Is Trump Doing When He “Parrots” Others?
The conventional caricature that Trump merely listens to “whoever spoke last” obscures a more systematic rhetorical strategy. Trump’s political and rhetorical method externalizes constraint and then reattributes it to himself.
When generals, JAG officers, or lawmakers invoke constitutional and legal constraints as inviolable, Trump perceives this not as legitimate authority but as competition for legitimacy. Unable to subvert the underlying institutional norms directly — because American generals and legal professionals derive their authority from oath, law, and professional codes that are resilient to mere fiat — Trump appropriates their language of moral constraint.
This is not an act of logical synthesis; it is a form of concept theft. He selectively lifts the moral framing that appears most normative and unassailable — such as “limit your actions to what is lawful, moral, and constrained by oath” — and redeploys it in an individualistic register. The result is twofold:
Diminution of institutional authority. By claiming that “only my morality” constrains him, he deflates the substantive force of legal and constitutional norms: if obedience to law is merely another form of personal ethical choice, then obedience to law has no institutional necessity.
Cloaking in the language of virtue. By adopting the vocabulary of morality without distinct reference to its objectively shared criteria, he attempts to appropriate the moral high ground of his interlocutors, even while rejecting the underlying institutional frameworks that give that language its normative content.
This rhetorical method undermines constitutional constraints without appearing overtly to reject moral restraint. It is not accidental that when confronted with the principle that service members are bound to refuse unlawful orders, his reaction is to frame being restrained by external law as a subjective choice of the executive, not a shared duty. This tactic diminishes the normative binding force of legal constraints, recoding them as personal preferences rather than intersubjective obligations.
Implications for Civil-Military Relations and Constitutional Order
The substantive risk of this pattern is that it blurs functional distinctions between law and preference at precisely the point where institutional integrity matters most. In a constitutional system, the U.S. military’s duty is to the Constitution and to the law as interpreted through institutional processes; it does not serve at the whim of individual moral assertions. When a president reframes legal constraints in terms of personal morality, he destabilizes the conceptual foundation that allows service members and civilian leaders alike to distinguish between lawful and arbitrary commands.
This has real consequences: debates over obeying or refusing orders are not abstract. They relate to how the military interprets its obligations, how civilian leaders perceive the legitimacy of legal restraints, and how political authority is exercised in contexts ranging from domestic security to international conflict. The heightened tensions, including Pentagon investigations into lawmakers for encouraging resistance to unlawful orders and lawsuits challenging those actions, reflect a broader constitutional stress.
In this context, Trump’s concept theft is not rhetorical laziness; it is a political strategy that treats institutional norms as sources of language to be repurposed for personal legitimation rather than as constraints to be respected. It is a strategy that, if left unexamined, could erode the very idea that law and institutional oath have normative force beyond individual fiat.
A Closing Word
To understand Trump’s engagement with American generals and legal constraints is not to reduce it to a caricature of indecision or instantaneous flattery. The more accurate pattern is that he absorbs the form of normative language without honoring the content of the institutions that underwrite it. In doing so, Trump attempts to cloak himself in the moral authority of his interlocutors — not out of respect, but out of a craven desire to subsume that authority into his own rhetorical bank, neutralizing the underlying institutional restraints that originally gave those moral claims their force.
That tactical reframing is the true mechanism behind what appears to be “parroting”; it is a subtle form of conceptual appropriation aimed at displacing institutional authority with personalistic “moralizing.”
Comments