10/20/2025
BREAKING🚨 Colonel Doug Krugman who served for 24 years in the United States Marine Corps has resigned because of Trump and released this:
On Sept. 30, at an unprecedented gathering of senior military leadership, President Donald Trump said, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room — of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.” I wasn’t invited to be in the room that day, and I had decided months earlier that I had to leave. By coincidence, Sept. 30 was my last day as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps. I gave up my career out of concern for our country’s future.
United States military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution without mental reservation or purpose of evasion. I swore or repeated that oath under five presidents, starting with former president Bill Clinton. I risked my life for it, serving as an infantry officer in two wars. I watched Marines die for it.
No commander in chief is perfect. President Clinton’s moral failures are well known. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq might be one of the worst errors in U.S. history. All recent presidents share responsibility for our failure in Afghanistan. I continued to serve despite all that because I believed the Constitution brought the country more success than failure, and I believed our presidents took their oaths to it seriously.
With President Trump, I no longer believe that. During his first term, his actions became increasingly difficult for me to justify, culminating with the Jan. 6 attack on Congress as it tried to execute its duties. I hoped he had learned from those errors, but it only took a few days of his second term for me to realize he had not. I could not swear without reservation to follow a commander in chief who seemed so willing to disregard the Constitution.
My departure was not about policy disagreements, which exist in every administration. President Trump won in 2024 and has the right to implement his policies within the law.
My first reservations were about promises and actions that I thought were morally wrong even if they were possibly legal. The Constitution gives the president the power to pardon, but pardoning roughly 1,600 of those who tried to violently overthrow the results of an election didn’t help defend the Constitution. Likewise, I didn’t see it as moral to deny refuge to Afghans who risked their lives to support us, which he did on Jan. 22. Ignoring reality to take advantage of vague laws to assume emergency powers is also immoral. For those who believe in honoring their word, breaking promises our country has made including some trade agreements President Trump made himself is not moral. These are not the kinds of actions that I’m willing to risk my life to defend.
Worse than immorality, however, has been President Trump’s willingness to disregard the law and Constitution to achieve his goals. When asked in May about the Fifth Amendment requirements for due process and if he needed to uphold the Constitution as president, the first words out of his mouth were “I don’t know.”
This month, National Guard officers received orders from the defense secretary that their governors opposed. A federal judge intervened, citing the lack of apparent emergency and the 10th Amendment. Those commanders and units were stuck between competing orders with no clear answer. When the president’s orders push or cross legal limits and put commanders in these situations, cohesion within our military is at risk.
President Trump’s description of Portland as a “war zone” is as fantastical as his belief that the June protests in a few blocks of Los Angeles would somehow “obliterate” the massive city of nearly 4 million. In both cases, his words had little connection to reality. Every dubious basis he gives for an order creates more room for doubt, more room for reservations and more threats to our unity.
The president said to military leadership on Sept. 30 of fighting domestic enemies: “And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” It wasn’t clear if he was referring to actual crime or to political criticism of him. In either case, military force is not the answer.
Some of his voters likely dismiss President Trump’s seeming disregard for the Constitution such as him saying that criticizing the president should be illegal, despite the First Amendment — as him exaggerating. Others apparently don’t care, believing that achieving their ends justifies any means. This president acts as though one election makes 236 years of constitutional order irrelevant. Instead of trying to work within the Constitution, or to amend it, President Trump is testing how far he can ignore it. If voters and legislators cannot close the gaps in our laws to clarify the limits to presidential power, those who serve our government will continue to struggle. The next president of either party may continue us down this path toward collapse.
I do not claim to speak for any other person or institution. I respect those who still serve, many of whom have service contracts and can’t simply retire like I did. But if they have doubts about their orders, they are not alone. They should be confident in questioning possibly immoral or illegal orders, remembering they are responsible for their own actions, and knowing others are asking the same questions.
I voluntarily gave up my rank as the president suggested, but the future of our country is more important than any individual’s career, wealth or power. I have no regrets about my decision. I have given up the service I loved for the freedom to do the right thing, the freedom to speak my mind and the freedom to speak in defense of our country.
