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Despite stiff competition, the Democrats’ recent attack on President Trump may be their most dangerous to date.

The six members of Congress whose viral video told our armed forces that “you must refuse illegal orders” crossed a perilous line. By making every soldier a general, empowering them to decide whether they agree with their orders, their message opens a Pandora’s Box that undermines the chain of command, a foundation of military effectiveness. Stopping just short of inciting insubordination, it openly encourages dissent within the ranks and, in the process, empowers our adversaries.

Although the video tells service members, “We have your back,” it puts the troops at grave risk, and not only the ones who heed their ill-considered advice. Battlefields are not forums for constitutional debate about the limits of executive authority. They are for concerted, often lethal, action. The failure of even one warfighter to carry out the plan can mean the difference between life and death – for an entire unit.

The Democrats and their enablers are also threatening the careers of those they purport to be counselling. Very few service members have the educational background necessary to assess the legality of their orders. Nevertheless, by posting their video, the six Democrats are putting them on notice that they now have an obligation to make such decisions on every order they are given.

It gets worse. Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s invocation of the Nazi war crime trials at Nuremberg in explaining why she lent her voice to the video implies that if they reclaim the executive branch in the future, Democrats might stab service members in the back if they don’t follow her orders: If you carry out an order later deemed to be illegal, we might come after you. This puts members of the military in an impossible position: Refuse to carry out an order, and you might face a court-martial; carry it out, and you might wind up in jail.

To appreciate their dilemma, consider the debate that has erupted over the video. Trump being Trump, he immediately responded with full force on Truth Social, calling the message “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.”

Seizing the opportunity to shift the focus from their own egregious behavior to the president’s overheated responses, Democrats and their media allies pilloried Trump for his unhelpful threat. Wise people on both sides have offered compelling arguments about whether or not the Democrats’ words crossed the line into illegality. The Department of Justice investigation into one of the video’s voices, Sen. Mark Kelly, may eventually answer that question. But the idea that service members must settle these questions on their own, in real time, when lives may hang in the balance, is ill-advised and unrealistic.

Each of those previous sentences could have begun with needless to say, but in the current political climate, even the obvious is a fount of fierce dispute. No surprise, then, that Slotkin and other Democrats are trying to make themselves out to be the victims while gaslighting the public about their actions. In a recent interview with ABC News, Michigan’s junior senator said she and her colleagues had issued “a totally benign statement” that merely restated provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The other five have all made similar remarks.

This is utterly disingenuous. In the real world, the incendiary intent of the video is indisputable: They are using service members to assert once again that Donald Trump is so beyond the pale that orders he gives as commander in chief ought to be disobeyed.

Our military history does, of course, include shameful episodes in which our military or intelligence services perpetrated terrible war crimes – the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, for example, or the Abu Ghraib torture chambers that operated during the Iraq War. If Trump’s military were commanding service members to engage in such conduct, the video would be defensible. The fact that Slotkin could not name a single illegal order the president has issued under gentle questioning from ABC’s Martha Raddatz underscores the Democrats’ purely partisan purpose.

The attacks on Trump are, needless to say, vicious and incessant. There are now so many of them that we can divide them into two broad categories. The first consists of ad hominem claims about the man himself: that he’s a congenital liar, grifter, and tax cheat who abused women with Jeffrey Epstein, and so forth. Ugly as these smears may be, they are lesser category exercises in character assassination.

The second category of attacks, which includes the viral video, the Russiagate hoax, his two impeachments, and the lawfare aimed at Trump and his associates, is more dangerous because it corrupts the institutions of government and the rule of law. The damage they have and continue to do will endure long after Trump leaves office.

Needless to say, through their endless war against the president, Democrats are not just playing with fire; they are burning down the house.