Jesse Waters on Monday complimented President Donald Trump’s apparent overreaction after the Pentagon announced an investigation of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) because of a video.
Kelly headlined a clip of six Democratic congresspeople from the military and intelligence telling service members to refuse “illegal orders.”
Trump originally menaced the video makers with talk of execution, and now the Defense Department has threatened to activate Kelly, a former Navy pilot and astronaut, and court-martial him.
“I’m glad that the U.S. military is now investigating this guy Kelly because this is what we expect from Donald Trump 2.0,” Watters said on Fox News’ “The Five” panel. “You can’t have the deep state interfering with a duly elected presidency and get away with it. You gotta draw the line in the sand, and you have to make examples out of people.”
Deep state? Make examples of?
Both sounded alarmingly familiar to some observers on X.
“Thanks for saying the quiet authoritarian part out loud,” one critic wrote, adding in another post: “Jesse Watters really thinks America runs on fear and revenge, not laws and rights.”
“When power starts calling dissent ‘an example,’ it isn’t enforcing order — it’s rehearsing tyranny,” another wrote.
Kennedy, the former MTV VJ turned political commentator who was a panelist on the show, piled on to Watters’ remarks.
“I think that Sen. Kelly might have violated the FAFO doctrine, and he’s gonna find out the hard way that there unfortunately are consequences,” she said, referring to the acronym for “fuck around, find out.”