It has been a few weeks since Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, and other Democrats released their outrageous video suggesting that members of the U.S. Military should refuse supposedly ‘illegal’ orders from President Trump. People are still talking about it because we have never really seen anything like it before now.
What the Democrats tried to do here is pretty simple to understand. They are trying to drive a wedge between our military and President Trump, the Commander in Chief. It’s the sort of thing that the CIA does during color revolutions in foreign countries and Elissa Slotkin is former CIA.
One question about all of this that keeps coming up is this: Where did this come from? Who came up with this idea? It really doesn’t look like something Democrats would just come up with out of thin air.
Well, here is one possible answer to these questions.
About a month before these Democrats released their video, a Never-Trump Republican named Tom Nichols wrote a column for The Atlantic which reads like a blueprint for this whole thing. Take a look at this:
The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here
To capture a democratic nation, authoritarians must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military. President Donald Trump and his circle of would-be autocrats have made rapid progress toward seizing these institutions and detaching them from the Constitution and rule of law. The intelligence community has effectively been muzzled, and the nation’s top lawyers and cops are being purged and replaced with loyalist hacks.
Only the military remains outside Trump’s grip. Despite the firing of several top officers—and Trump’s threat to fire more—the U.S. armed forces are still led by generals and admirals whose oath is to the Constitution, not the commander in chief. But for how long?
First of all, what Nichols says here is completely wrong. The military is not outside of Trump’s grip. As President of the United States, he is the Commander in Chief. Now read this next part and special attention to the bolded ending:
Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army. In his first term, Trump regularly violated the sacred American tradition of the military’s political neutrality, but people around him—including retired and active-duty generals such as James Mattis, John Kelly, and Mark Milley—restrained some of his worst impulses. Now no one is left to stop him: The president learned from his first-term struggles and this time has surrounded himself with a Cabinet of sycophants and ideologues rather than advisers, especially those at the Pentagon. He has declared war on Chicago; called Portland, Oregon, a “war zone”; and referred to his political opponents as “the enemy from within.” Trump clearly wants to use military power to exert more control over the American people, and soon, top U.S.-military commanders may have to decide whether they will refuse such orders from the commander in chief. The greatest crisis of American civil-military relations in modern history is now under way.
The similarities here are undeniable. It looks like someone in the Democrat party read this column and thought it would be a great way to undermine Trump by trying to plant seeds of dissent in the military.
Of course, it could just be one great big coincidence too. Anyone buying that?
In his next column for The Atlantic, Nichols suggested that Mark Kelly should be the Secretary of Defense. Is this also a coincidence?
The author of the below “Atlantic” screed is Tom Nichols.
From 1997 to 2022, Nichols was permanent faculty at the U.S. Naval War College. He has never served in the military, but does have lots of degrees from some ostensibly impressive universities.
In case you were wondering… pic.twitter.com/mvcigrWdAC
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) December 3, 2025
Republicans in Congress need to look into this. There are simply too many convenient coincidences here.