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Trump continues to insist Democrats committed ‘sedition’ while avoiding another direct call for their deaths
John Bowdenin Washington, D.C.Sunday 23 November 2025 14:41 GMTComments
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Donald Trump issued another pair of calls for Democrats who spoke out against illegal orders to the military to be jailed late Saturday evening as he battles a sinking public image and unprecedented resistance within his own party on the Hill.
The president delivered his latest statements in the form of all-caps tirades on Truth Social, where he defended the supposed legal basis for charging members of the opposing political party with treason or seditious conspiracy. But even in doing so, he seemed to back away explicitly from calls for their executions, something he’d raised as a threat only days before.
But the president was clearly irked by the refusal of congressional Republicans to join him, and used one Truth Social post to weakly insist that America’s legal scholars were on his side. The episode marked just his latest crash-out stemming from the original issue: A video, posted by congressional Democratic members who served in the military, urging the commanders of the armed services to follow their constitutional duty to refuse illegal orders from the White House or Defense Department.
“MANY GREAT LEGAL SCHOLARS AGREE THAT THE DEMOCRAT TRAITORS THAT TOLD THE MILITARY TO DISOBEY MY ORDERS, AS PRESIDENT, HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME OF SERIOUS PROPORTION!” he argued.
In a second post ten minutes earlier, just before midnight, he wrote: “THE TRAITORS THAT TOLD THE MILITARY TO DISOBEY MY ORDERS SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW, NOT ROAMING THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS TRYING TO EXPLAIN THAT WHAT THEY SAID WAS OK. IT WASN’T, AND NEVER WILL BE!”
open image in galleryDonald Trump has seen congressional Republicans refuse to back up his more outlandish claims and accusations against Democrats as his grasp on them slipsHe added that Democrats like Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Chris Deluzio who appeared in the video had committed “SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL”, before noting incorrectly: “AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME.”
Sedition itself is not a defined crime in the U.S. criminal code. The applicable charge is seditious conspiracy, a similar-sounding charge that requires prosecutors to prove that an organized conspiracy exists aimed at overthrowing or otherwise harming the federal government.
And legal scholars generally agree that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights generally protects a wide range of speech and expression against the government, including calls for it to be abolished. Generally speaking, anti-government speech or expression is protected unless it actively calls for imminent violent criminal acts against the government or its representatives.
Nothing in the video message released by Democrats would fall outside of those protections, except in the opinions of Trump’s closest loyalists. In fact, a number of constitutional law experts have already spoken about how the video does not call for any use of force to resist the president or his actions; merely telling officers to refuse orders they believe are illegal falls far short of that standard.
"Encouraging the military not to obey unlawful orders is not an agreement under the seditious conspiracy statute,” Carlton Larson, a constitutional law scholar with University of California-Davis, told Politifact.
More telling, however, is the fact that even Trump’s allies in Congress aren’t backing him up.
Speaker Mike Johnson would not back Trump up on his explicit calls for Democrats to be charged with seditious “behavior” last week, and gave the notion that the president was merely providing a legal definition of the term as his excuse for the president obviously urging that those members be put to death. Johnson’s half-hearted defense of the president’s words ignored that there was very little in his orgininal statements that corresponded to reality, including his ongoing failure to actually get the name of the actual corresponding criminal charge right in his posts.
open image in gallerySpeaker Mike Johnson suffered defeats in the House this month as he faced a rebellion over the Epstein files and on Saturday saw a member of his caucus announce her resignation, citing death threats from Trump supporters (Reuters)Johnson told reporters on Thursday that "the words that the president chose are not the ones that I would use", while maintaining that Trump was merely "defining the crime of sedition", which he did not do and is not, by itself, a federal crime.
He had no response to the barrage of death threats and even bomb threats reported by the members of Congress the president had called to be executed, which came as Republicans have weakly argued that political violence is a left-wing problem that does not exist in widespread instances on the right. Meanwhile, Indiana Republicans who resisted Trump’s demand for the state to begin mid-decade redistricting in the hopes of changing the midterm election results are also facing those death threats from some of the president’s followers.
Republicans eagerly condemned political violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination over the summer, but the push to punish Democrats over it quickly fell apart in the face of the evidence of Trump’s own infatuation with the same concept.
open image in galleryMAGA-aligned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene cited threats from Trump supporters as a reason she would resign in January (Getty)The president famously called for protesters at his rallies in 2016 to be beaten up by other attendees. His latest calls for Democrats to be killed for “seditious behavior” is just the most recent example in a long line of instances wherein Trump or his followers have excused or joined in on calls for violence or state suppression of his political enemies.
In another Truth Social post this past week, Trump “re-truthed” a post from a follower demanding that members of Congress be “hanged”. The post could have been taken as outright support for lynch mobs; the U.S. government has not put an inmate to death by hanging since 1996, and has only used the method three times since the 1960s.
Even Trump’s own press secretary would not directly endorse the legal basis for charging Democrats with seditious conspiracy this past week. She also denied that Trump wanted to see members of Congress executed, despite him claiming their actions were “punishable by death”.
open image in galleryWhen asked if the president wants to execute members of Congress, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, 'No' (Win McNamee/Getty Images)“The sanctity of our military rests on the chain of command, and if that chain of command is broken, it can lead to people getting killed. It can lead to chaos,” Karoline Leavitt said.
“That is a very, very dangerous message, message, and it perhaps is punishable by law. I'm not a lawyer. I'll leave that to the Department of Justice and the Department of War to decide,” Leavitt continued.
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