The National Guardsman who won’t take orders from Trump

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.

Blaha’s campaign has taken a decidedly populist tone, with slogans like “workers over billionaires” and a platform that includes policies such as a billionaire tax and free school lunches.

He’s also taken inspiration from mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York City, advocating for a rent freeze, which he says the federal government could deliver through policies similar to what was seen during the COVID-19 era, which were meant to give renters a reprieve during the pandemic’s economic downturn. He says policies like that could give renters a break while the government works to facilitate the building of more housing, which he sees as a more permanent solution.

“[Mamdani’s] policies really resonated with the voters,” Blaha said. “I think that something like a moratorium or a rent freeze is definitely a temporary solution. Ultimately, though, the housing market is completely messed up right now, especially with private equity investing in a lot of the housing market, and just so many houses being Airbnbs in our district.”

Blaha said that he was inspired to launch his campaign after being disappointed with Budzinski, who was first elected in 2022, on a number of issues.

One moment of disappointment, Blaha said, was in a telephone town hall earlier this year, when Budzinski gave a muddled answer in response to a question from a constituent asking whether she agreed with President Trump that there were only two genders, men and women.

Budzinski’s office later said that she did not agree with Trump on this matter, telling The Lavender Newsletter that “The Congresswoman’s response on the town hall was that male and female are genders” and that “for some people their experience is different.” Regardless, Blaha said that the incident got him to take a closer look at her affiliations in Congress.

He told Salon that he was disappointed that she, alongside dozens of other House democrats, voted for last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which was packed with conservative culture war priorities like denying health care to the transgender children of servicemembers.

“Then I realized also, I am against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and she is a recipient of a bunch of pro-Israel PAC money from AIPAC, J Street, and she refuses to even sign on to the Block the Bombs Act, which are definitely all red lines for me,” Blaha said. “But it’s not just that I’m running against Nikki. I am running a grassroots campaign, not taking corporate and foreign lobbyist donations. That’s what enables people to actually run on progressive platforms.”

In terms of policies, Blaha supports popular progressive priorities like Medicare for All, overturning Citizens United through legislation and closing tax loopholes exploited by the wealthy and major corporations.

Blaha, however, has also been a vocal critic of Trump’s efforts to politicize the military, speaking out against Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in California and saying that he would refuse to deploy against his own community.

“I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people who agree with my position and thank me for speaking up. They think I’m crazy for speaking up, but they still say ‘Thank you,’” Blaha said. “I’ve come out and said, ‘Well, nobody’s trained for this, aside from a couple small units that do it.’ And now, [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth is making the units, and he wants to train them for it.”

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.’”