Could Military Orders Via Tweet Return In Trump’s Second Term?

When Donald Trump begins his second term as president in January, national security law experts predict he may return to his old habit of issuing orders to the military via social media, a practice which could cause confusion in the ranks as the relevant chains of command seek clarity to carry out the commander in chief’s intent.
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It remains to be seen whether Trump will be as active on social media in his second term as president as he was in his first term. One complicating factor is Trump’s change of platforms. The president was banned from Twitter after the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and while billionaire Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account after buying Twitter in 2022, Trump said at the time that he preferred his new platform, Truth Social. Trump began tweeting again in August 2023, though by that point Musk had renamed the platform X.

In the days since his reelection, Trump has issued policy statements from X, which now allows paying subscribers to post up to 25,000 characters – far greater than the old limit of 280. Bracknell expects to see more orders-by-tweet or, more accurately, by X post, in the near future, because Trump has fewer constraints than he did in his first term.
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Katherine Kuzminski, Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, offered that service members swear an oath to protect and defend the constitution, no matter who’s in office.

“That is part of the stability of what our professional all-volunteer force provides to the nation,” she said. “They don’t belong to a partisan community.”

Read the full article and more on Air & Space Force Magazine.