Good morning! A quick note before today’s piece: I’ll be away for the next three days, supporting my sons as they scatter their father’s ashes at a place sacred to his family, where he’ll join his mother and sister, as he asked. Posts will be sparse this weekend.
Start with a photograph. Black and white, 1964, the New York Military Academy. A teenage Donald Trump stands in full cadet dress uniform beside his parents, Fred and Mary, sword at his hip, plumed hat. He was sent there at thirteen because his father had run out of patience with him. He thrived on the discipline, or at least on delegating it to other people, according to classmates who remember a cadet captain more interested in barking orders than doing the work himself. He never served. Four deferments and a bad pair of heels saw to that. Yesterday, without comment, he reposted the photo to Truth Social. He’d posted it once before, in March, with a caption, “At Military Academy with my parents, Fred and Mary!” and got mocked for stolen valor so thoroughly that this time he apparently decided the picture could speak for itself.
Now put the second photograph next to it. Major Jason Watson, United States Air Force, forty years old, arrested twice this summer for the crime of taking his oath literally. The first time was July 1st, standing on the Capitol steps in uniform, holding a sign that said Impeach, Convict, Remove. The second came after he told a CNN interviewer that the president is “flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law” and “engaged in rampant corruption.” His attorney now says he’s been charged with three specifications under Article 88 of the UCMJ: contempt toward officials, plus five specifications for disobeying orders and two for conduct unbecoming an officer. Article 88 is almost archaeological military law. Only two successful court-martial convictions are generally identified since the UCMJ took effect. One involved an Army lieutenant protesting Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. The other was Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who publicly attacked the Biden administration and military leadership over the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Scheller was court-martialed, so of course Donald Trump’s Pentagon hired him. He is now a senior adviser in the department Watson is accused of bringing into disrepute. Contempt becomes a résumé line once the correct president is being contemned.
Here is the whole rotten arrangement in two pictures: a man who dressed up as a soldier and never once answered for anything in his life, presiding over the prosecution of a man who put his actual career, actual freedom, and actual pension on the line to say the quiet part out loud. One of them is being charged with contempt. The other built a career on being contemptuous.
It’s worth remembering the administration’s reaction the last time this subject came up in the abstract. When Senator Mark Kelly, Representative Elissa Slotkin, and several other lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds put out a video simply reminding service members of their existing legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump did not treat it as a civics lesson. He called it seditious and suggested the conduct was “punishable by DEATH.” Pete Hegseth referred Kelly for investigation. That was the response to a video. Watson is not a video. He is a man who did the thing the video described, in uniform, on the Capitol steps, on camera, and he is the one now sitting with actual charges instead of a strongly worded post. The danger was never the disobedience. It was the possibility that someone would actually do it.
Watson has been remarkably unsentimental about what he has given up, but don’t mistake that for not valuing it.
In an interview recorded before his confinement, he said plainly that he understands his actions are incompatible with continued military service. Losing the career he spent seventeen years building, he said, is “already a sacrifice that I’ve made.”
Later he described the calculation almost clinically. We all make cost-benefit analyses, he said. Is what I am doing worth the cost? What is the greater risk? How much am I losing?
Watson looked at what he had available to sacrifice for his country and made his choice.
Howard Zinn who made the point that has been rattling around my head all week: civil disobedience was never really the country’s problem. Civil obedience was. The history of atrocity is filled with people following orders, not breaking them.
Watson may have a difficult legal case. Article 88 does not give an officer a free pass simply because he believes what he said is true. If this reaches trial, one of the fights will be over where forceful political criticism ends and legally punishable contempt begins.
But the larger question is harder to confine inside the UCMJ. It is the question the whole country is having with itself right now: whether obedience to a man is the same thing as fidelity to a Constitution, and whether anyone in a position to enforce that distinction still has the nerve to try.
I’ll have more to say when I’m back, including a longer piece I’ve been building that puts Watson beside some more comfortable members of this administration’s inner circle, the ones who got promoted for the instinct he refused to perform.
For now: write to your representatives. Support his legal defense fund. Say his name. Share his story.
And perhaps ask yourself the question Watson has already asked himself: What do I have available to give?
Not everyone has a seventeen-year military career to put on the table. Nor should anyone imagine that courage requires martyrdom. But all of us have something, time, attention, money, a voice, a vote, a body willing to stand peacefully in a public place and refuse to pretend that what is happening is normal.
There is a long and honorable American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, of making good trouble when obedience becomes complicity. Be thinking much more seriously about what that looks like now: deliberate, collective, and with our eyes open.
Watson believes the easiest thing for the government to do is stall until we forget him.
Don’t.
Make some good trouble.
Carpe momentum.