Talk of coups in America has usually focused on a president who refuses to yield power, with military support. Less often considered is the converse: could senior military leaders move against a sitting president whom they judge to be acting unlawfully? Recent, highly unusual orders summoning hundreds of commanding officers to a central meeting make that hypothetical feel less abstract. Could there be a leap from “uncomfortable emergency” to “military takeover”?
Start with the constitutional reality. Members of the U.S. armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution, not to an individual. That oath undergirds a crucial legal principle: soldiers must follow lawful orders and resist manifestly unlawful ones. In extremis, a commander who is clearly and repeatedly flouting law could present military leaders with a choice between obedience and dereliction.
Yet institutions and norms matter. The United States is not a polity where the military habitually substitutes judgment for civilian authority. A tradition of apolitical professionalism, a sprawling, decentralized force presence, independent courts, an elected legislature, and fifty state governments all act as redundant brakes on unilateral action. Historically, when a president and generals have clashed, the result has been dismissals, resignations, legal fights, or quiet hedging — not generals marching into Washington.
So an overt military coup against a president has been considered exceedingly unlikely. For such a move to occur would require an extraordinary confluence: blatant, sustained constitutional violations by the White House; near-unanimity among senior military commanders that civilian channels cannot or will not resolve the crisis; coordination across disparate forces and agencies; and either tacit elite agreement or a legitimizing narrative the public accepts. The U.S. has been structurally resistant to that set of conditions, but is Trump’s governance rapidly setting the stage?
What is far more plausible, and more urgent to watch for, is the politicization and instrumentalization of the military and security institutions. The rapid convening of top commanders can be read in more than one way. It might be an innocuous doctrinal briefing; it might be an optics-driven display of control; or it may be precisely the kind of centralized gathering that a leader uses to map loyalties and to make dissent costly. Could the Administration be trying to nip coup possibilities in the bud? Authoritarian governments the world over have followed this playbook: start with culture and discipline, then ratchet expectations and purge or sideline those who refuse to conform.
Why does that matter? Because slow, incremental erosion of institutional norms is how democracies die most often. You don’t always see tanks on the streets before you lose key liberties; you see personnel moves, standards redefined, and a professional ethic quietly replaced by one of political fidelity. Once loyalty tests replace meritocratic standards, the force’s role shifts profoundly from national defense to regime defense.
What should concerned citizens and institutions do? Remain vigilant. Independent oversight, congressional scrutiny, a free press, and public attention are the proper counterweights. Resignations offered in protest should be publicized and debated, judicial reviews should be sought for overbroad directives, and legislators should use hearings and appropriations to assert civilian control. Is it too late to redouble the strength of the constitutional mechanisms that diffuse dictatorial power?
Convening senior commanders, especially at short notice and on an unusual scale, deserves scrutiny because it is the sort of institutional maneuver one sees on the first page of authoritarian playbooks. We should neither be complacent nor indulge in fevered speculation. The health of a democracy is held less by heroic last stands than by the cumulative strength of its norms, but we may fast be reaching the point where the former is necessary.
