Key takeaways:

• President Trump’s attacks on Sen. Mark Kelly and other Democrats for urging members of the armed forces not to follow unlawful orders is dangerous and incendiary.
  
• There’s little reason to believe, however, that this attempt will be any more successful than similar attempts to intimidate other critics of the president, such as James Comey or Letitia James, via legal actions.
  
• Talking like a dictator is a lot harder than ruling like a dictator in a system designed to balance powers against each other and prioritize the rule of law over an autocrat’s decree.

On the face of it, the Trump administration’s persecution of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) seems really scary. But if you look a little deeper, the story starts to look a little different: proof of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, to be sure, but also evidence of the weakness and incompetence of his administration’s efforts to actually act on them.

The Kelly situation began a week ago, when the senator appeared in a video with five other elected Democrats — all of whom have national security backgrounds. In the video, addressed directly to members of the military, former NASA astronaut Kelly and his colleagues warn that the Trump administration is “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.” For this reason, they wished to remind military professionals that they have a right — and maybe even an obligation — to disobey any unlawful orders they might receive.

The White House was furious. In Truth Social posts last week, Trump called the video “seditious behavior by traitors,” adding that sedition is a crime “punishable by death.” While this rhetoric appeared empty — Trump lacks the power to execute senators — that doesn’t make it any less alarming coming from the president.

Then, on Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried to translate Trump’s fury into actual policy. He announced an investigation into Kelly, who he claims is uniquely subject to Pentagon jurisdiction due to his status as a retired Navy officer — threatening to order him back to active duty and prosecute him under military law for allegedly interfering with the “good order and discipline of the armed forces.”

In theory, this is all very scary: a president openly calling for the execution of opposition party legislators, and the head of his armed forces attempting to haul one of those legislators in front of a military tribunal. That sounds like textbook authoritarianism.

And if the threat against Kelly were serious, it would be. Yet as one leading scholar of military law put it, the investigation is “preposterous”: there are a number of reasons to believe that there’s no actual case against the senator, ranging from the unobjectionable content of Kelly’s message to his status as a lawmaker.

Indeed, attempting legally laughable........

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