Time For Criminal Referrals December 2, 2025December 2, 2025 Trump’s Plan Is Now Out in the Open, writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic: “It’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots.” Trump is in the process of building his own paramilitary force. He is invoking wartime powers to deport people without due process, even suggesting that American citizens may be sent to foreign prisons. He has deployed National Guard troops to cities over the objections of local officials. In a speech to American troops in Japan, he warned: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.” My colleague Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College, warns that eventually what Trump is doing will become a new principle for the use of force: “He is acclimating people to the notion that the military is his private army, unconstrained by law, unconstrained by norms, unconstrained by American traditions.” Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the senior judge advocates general, removing the officials who could obstruct the execution of unlawful orders from the commander in chief. Their dismissals will also have a chilling effect on those who remain. The firing of the JAGs is just one element of a broader purge of the military, which started at the beginning of Trump’s second term. In February, five former defense secretaries, including James Mattis, who served under Trump in his first term, wrote a letter to lawmakers, saying the dismissals “raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power.” Think about it: Senator Mark Kelly, et al, told the military not to break the law — for which Trump said they should be hanged. And now Kash Patel is investigating them. Really? Asking Soldiers to Obey the UCMJ Isn’t a Crime; But Trump Thinks it is. Before Elissa Slotkin participated in that video, she posted this one (2 very wow minutes) which suggests, as Wehner does, that Trump may just be setting the military up for a change toward a more authoritarian direction. Wehner concludes: If America recovers, the path will lie not simply through electoral politics. The fate of the country rests on the recovery of republican virtue, the cultivation of an active passion for the public interest, and a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the common good. Words and phrases such as honor and love of country have to stir people out of their lethargy and into action. We saw some of that in the “No Kings” protests, but much more needs to happen. My colleague David Brooks, citing the work of the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, reminds us that “citizens are not powerless; they have many ways to defend democracy.” Whether we step up or not is a matter of civic will and civic courage. Can we summon those virtues at a moment when American ideals are under sustained assault by the American president? A final thought: As we continue along this journey, into places none of us has ever quite been before, it is worth holding close to our hearts the words of the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel. They moved me when I first read them, in the early 1990s, when so much was so different, and I have cited them several times since, but they hold more meaning now than ever. “I have few illusions,” Havel wrote. “But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” Two who are definitely striving in that good cause are Stuart Stevens and Simon Rosenberg. Their conversation yesterday is not to be missed. (I’ve saved you the first 80 seconds of “great to see you” stuff.) It’s past time, they say, for some form of highly publicized criminal referrals . . . now, addressed to some future Justice Department, once we have one again . . . both to call out what’s been done and to make potential perpetrators think twice about doing more. Support the opposition party?