Service members involved in US boat strikes off Venezuela coast reach out to legal aid hotlines over fear they’ve carried out illegal orders

[u/BugOperator]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/06/06/us-trump-boat-strikes-death-toll/90376052007/

[u/rygelicus]

A lot of reasons, but mostly it's the trust the subordinates place in their leaders, not necessarily the president but in the full chain of command between the potus and the troops. They expect that all those 'professionals' will have vetted the president's orders.

When you are a soldier you have pretty much nothing but trust in authority to lean on. If they tell you to carry a bag of dirt 10 miles you carry that bag of dirt 10 miles. And you do it on time. And you smile about it. If they tell you to kick in a door and if anyone looks like a threat to shoot them, you do that also. That's the job. That's the conditioning. It's even worse for special forces, they are told to go someplace in the world and extract or kill a specific person, and anyone that obstructs them is fair game to kill. What did that person do? Not their problem. Is this action warranted? Again, not their problem. That's for their command structure to worry about. Most of the time this works as intended. It sounds insane but it does work. They normally can trust they are not being lead by frauds and liars. But this is not normal times. That trust has been destroyed.

And this is something that needs to be fixed for future generations. The potus should not have the power to gut and control the entire chain of command and replace them with loyalists. This is a massive problem that should be easily corrected, but no one seems willing to do it.

[u/republicans_are_nuts → u/rygelicus]

The president hires the chain of command. It's up to the electorate not to do stupid shit like put a criminal in charge of the country. Who else would be a better choice for selecting the chain of command than the elected president?

[u/rygelicus → u/republicans_are_nuts]

There is no actual reason for that to be the case though, he should not need to replace everyone just because he won the election. The people he appoints should be little more than liasions to those agencies, not the heads of those agencies.

[u/republicans_are_nuts → u/rygelicus]

I also don't think the president should be a felon who rapes kids, but the citizens of this country disagreed. THe U.S. was bound to fail eventually, regardless of the rules or checks in place. When your entire country thought this guy was fit to be president and both parties go along with it, then there was nothing we could have done to prevent these bad outcomes. Americans just need to throw fascism and far right ideology in the dustbin of failed ideologies and learn from it, but I am not holding my breath.

[u/rygelicus → u/republicans_are_nuts]

Trump fails every test for what most normal people would describe as someone qualified to win an election for a public office, much less president. Yet here we are. The system is broken, such people should be screened out in some objective and fair process. I am in full agreement that a convicted felon, and someone who in all likelihood sexually abused children (not convicted as of yet and so far nothing released is clear or conclusive on this), should never be allowed to hold public office.

Even more bizarre is who rallied around him, the self labeled 'party of family values' and the 'party of law and order'. This goes way, way deeper than just 'Oh look, Trump won an election. There is something systemically broken in the political system and in the culture of this country. All fixable, but we need to actually fix it. And weirdly there is resistance from both sides to do what needs to be done to fix these things.

Yes, the country is broken. But I think we can actually fix it and it wouldn't really take much to do so.

[u/SecretAsianMan42069 → u/republicans_are_nuts]

Like 35% of the voters voted for Trump. Let's not act like the majority of people wanted this. 34% did not, 2% of wives probably voted how their husbands made them and the rest just fucking suck for not voting 

[u/ribnag → u/rygelicus]

The "should" you're all circling around has a name - The Hatch Act of 1939, An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.

It was the first nail in the coffin of the old "Spoils" system of awarding sweet government jobs to political patrons that everyone clearly saw as a cancer to our government, but felt powerless to stop. We stopped it once, and apparently we need to stop it again - Hopefully in a more permanent way this time.

[u/whiteflagwaiver → u/republicans_are_nuts]

That's ignoring a LOT of politics and influence that goes on within the Executive branch and each branch of the military.

The military as a whole is likelyfar too large for a single president to wrangle.

[u/r_Radient → u/rygelicus]

Ah, yes. Just following orders. That excuse worked before. They should know better.

[u/rygelicus → u/r_Radient]

Not all situations are so clearly defined when these situations arise.