The National Guardsman who won't take orders from Trump [View all]

The National Guardsman who won’t take orders from Trump
Dylan Blaha, an Illinois congressional candidate, says “I was just following orders” is no excuse

By Russell Payne
Staff Reporter
Published November 6, 2025 9:00AM (EST)




(Salon) Dylan Blaha, an Illinois National Guard member, is waging a campaign focused at bringing an affordability agenda to Washington D.C., while sounding the alarm on President Donald Trump’s politicization of the United States military.

In May, Blaha announced that he was challenging Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill., in the Democratic primary for Illinois’s 13th Congressional District, which stretches up from East Saint Louis in the south of the state north through Springfield, Decatur and Champaign.

In an interview with Salon, Blaha said that he was fighting to represent the district with a different sort of politics, one that rejected the influence and money of special interests and put issues of affordability for working-class families first.

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Blaha went on to say that training for the guard is typically focused on potential overseas deployment or helping in disaster relief efforts, not in helping a historically unpopular president settle political scores.

“National Guard soldiers don’t want to be pitted against their community. They don’t agree with all this stuff, but I do feel like there is a culture of fear that makes it so that there are very few people who have spoken out,” Blaha said. “ I do think you kind of have those two conflicting ideas that they don’t want to do this, but they’re also afraid to speak out. And I just am afraid that we’ll see the same thing that we heard in 1930s 1940s Germany, where a lot of people say, ‘Well, I was just following orders.’” ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/06/the-national-guardsman-who-wont-take-orders-from-trump/