It’s special-election day in Tennessee’s 7th congressional district, where Republican Matt Van Epps is trying to stave off an unexpectedly strong challenge from Democratic state lawmaker Aftyn Behn in a district Donald Trump won last year by 22 points. Polling shows the race within the margin of error, and—as our Lauren Egan has reported—outside money is pouring in from both Republicans and Democrats as the race turns into an early indicator for next year’s midterms. Happy Tuesday.
Pete Hegseth, Sad Sack Secretary
On the morning of September 3, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appeared on Fox News to boast about the U.S. military’s attack the day before on a speedboat in the Caribbean. Hegseth showed Defense Department video of the attack, which killed all eleven individuals aboard, and said, with ghoulish relish, that “I watched it live.”
“We knew exactly who it was, exactly what they were doing, exactly where they were going, what they were involved in,” he added. “It was very well understood exactly what assets would be used in order to achieve the effect.”
But the video Hegseth released and narrated was truncated. It only showed the first strike on the boat. There was no acknowledgment, as has since been reported, that there had been a second strike that killed two helpless survivors, or that the second strike had been undertaken in order to comply with Hegseth’s reportedly spoken order that no one be left alive. The full video of the events of September 2 has yet to be released or provided to Congress.
So the coverup of the administration’s first strike in what seems very likely to be a broader war against Venezuela began the day after the attack—and it’s continued until today. But the lies and the coverup have gotten more chaotic since Friday’s Washington Post report on the second strike.
Indeed, it’s been a veritable parade of obfuscation. Hegseth’s spokesman first said that the “entire narrative was false” and that the Post and CNN (which also reported on the double-tap strike) “just fabricate anonymously sourced stories out of whole cloth.”
So was there no second strike, and no order from Hegseth to kill the entire crew of the vessel?
Well, not exactly. The administration has had to acknowledge there was a second strike. But it refuses to explain what role Hegseth—though he’d said he had watched the operation live, and presumably received detailed after-action reports—played in it. The defense secretary posted Friday, after the Washington Post story appeared, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” Then, on Monday, he put the entire onus for the strike on a subordinate, Adm. Mitch Bradley.
In other words: Hegseth was there, watching live, but didn’t issue any orders, but was extremely happy that the spirit of the orders he never issued were executed anyway, which he then took credit for in real time and hailed as a glorious triumph without revealing that it wasn’t.
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The obfuscation doesn’t end there. On Sunday, Donald Trump, the supposed commander-in-chief, weighed in. He said he “wouldn’t have wanted . . . a second strike.” But on Monday the White House said the second strike was a good thing, “conducted in self-defense to protect U.S. interests.”
Meanwhile, the administration has refused to provide Congress with Hegseth’s written “execute” order to engage the boat with lethal force, nor the videotape, nor anything much else, despite repeated bipartisan requests from leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Nor has the administration even attempted to explain how the military action and Hegseth’s orders are consistent with the Defense Department’s law of war manual, which says that it is “prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.”
Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page can’t quite stomach all of this. After some ritual denunciation of “civil libertarians and progressives who want to constrain the President’s ability to conduct military action,” the Journal admits that the events “warrant a close look from Congress. That includes Mr. Hegseth giving an account under oath. . . . If Mr. Hegseth is right, then the factual record will support him.”
The Journal also acknowledged that “the Administration isn’t explaining its aims in the Caribbean with either voters or Congress.” It describes the administration’s response to congressional requests for more details on the boat strikes and their legal rationale as “mostly a stonewall.”
We’ve had lies and stonewalls before. Just over a half century ago, in August 1964, an American administration lied about a naval incident in the Gulf of Tonkin off the shore of North Vietnam, in order to help lay the groundwork for further military action against that nation.
One resists a comparison of Vietnam to Venezuela, and of the Trump administration to the Johnson administration. And one’s tempted to echo Marx, and to say that if history is repeating itself, the first time was tragedy, this time is a farce.
But war crimes aren’t a farce. Congress should investigate them. And a broader war—unjustified, unauthorized, and unlawful—wouldn’t be a farce. Congress should stop it.
Help us GiveDirectly
This Giving Tuesday, along with other Substackers, The Bulwark is helping raise funds for GiveDirectly. If you haven’t heard of them, GiveDirectly is a charity with a pretty straightforward approach:
They transfer cash directly to some of the world’s poorest people. In the past year, they’ve given nearly $119 million to more than 143,000 people living in extreme poverty across the developing world.
We’re doing this because we believe it’s one of the best ways to have a real, tangible impact on people’s lives. If you’re able, we hope you’ll lend your support today:
This feels especially important right now because Donald Trump and Elon Musk effectively ended the U.S. foreign aid footprint, slashing lifesaving support to developing nations in a move that will cost millions of lives over the coming years.
This is being done in our name, right now. It serves no purpose except to inflict unnecessary cruelty on those less fortunate than us. The least we can do is offer some support to help offset this senseless, man-made catastrophe.
We spend a lot of time complaining about the state of the world and bemoaning the fact that everything is terrible. Today we’re trying to make a more immediate difference. Help us lend a helping hand.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Sarah and George Answer Your Questions! In a special listener mailbag episode of George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell), they take on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” DOJ and court reform, and post-Trump conservatism, plus George lists his many guitars.
FML. Here Come the Nick Fuentes Clones. This edition of WILL SOMMER’s False Flag deals with the unfortunate reality that many conservative websites aren’t dismissing groypers—they’re trying to clone them.
Pete Hegseth, Moral Failure, and the Erosion of Military Legitimacy… Congress needs to find out if any laws were broken and who is responsible, writes MARK HERTLING.
Trump Keeps Overreaching—And Losing… On the Mona Charen Show, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to discuss the growing resistance to Trump’s agenda—grand juries rejecting his charges, the DOJ stumbling, senators warning troops against illegal orders, and his tariffs and deportations driving prices even higher.
Quick Hits
THE HUBBUB OVER HABBA: Donald Trump just can’t catch a break in court when it comes to his attempts to bend the law to keep his hand-picked federal prosecutors in charge. On Monday, a federal appeals court unanimously ruled against the Department of Justice’s extraordinary attempts to keep Trump’s former personal attorney Alina Habba installed as the top prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, affirming a lower court’s decision that permitting Habba to carry on in the role would unlawfully freeze the Senate out of the confirmation process altogether.
Trump initially appointed Habba as an interim U.S. attorney, a role with a statutory lifespan of 120 days. But the Senate seemed unlikely to consent to making her role permanent—thanks to a longstanding tradition of getting the all-clear from a state’s own senators when it comes to these types of nominations. When the clock ran out for Habba, a panel of federal judges selected a career prosecutor in the office as her temporary replacement, keeping with the law governing such interim vacancies.
All this was bog-standard procedure. But Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi went nuclear, firing the career prosecutor and executing a complicated sequence of appointments and promotions designed to put Habba right back in the captain’s chair. That bought Habba another month of time—until a federal judge ruled in August that Habba’s re-appointment was unlawful.
Habba, of course, isn’t the only Trump-loyalist would-be U.S. attorney currently in legal limbo. Down in the Eastern District of Virginia, a different federal judge just ruled that another former Trump personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was improperly appointed to run that office. Sooner or later, this is all winding up before the Supreme Court.
THE FREE PRESS: It’s dress-up week at the Pentagon, where the Defense Department is hosting a ludicrous summit welcoming the motley crew of right-wing influencers who now constitute the entirety of the credentialed Pentagon press corps. Laura Loomer, Lance Johnston, R.C. Maxwell, and others were in the building yesterday, taking gloating photos and videos in the cubicles vacated by mainstream media reporters or posing goofily at the briefing-room podium. The Washington Post notes that Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson is even supposed to give an on-camera briefing—her first—to these worthy scribes today.
One could hardly imagine a funnier moment for this sort of ridiculous kabuki, which is taking place just as shocking reports of a double-tap strike on an accused drug boat off the coast of Venezuela are rocking the Pentagon. As Bill noted above, the White House has already been forced to change its story once—admitting yesterday that Navy Adm. Frank Bradley had authorized the second strike on survivors in the water after initially denying the story in its entirety. A Pentagon briefing sounds like a good opportunity to dig for more details. Get in there, gang! Break some news!
PRESIDENTIAL IMAGING: The White House has been facing renewed questions about President Donald Trump’s health after his latest physical included an unusual detail: the president received an MRI scan during his routine physical back in October. For weeks, the president said nothing about it, insisting he didn’t even remember what the MRI was for. The White House ducked questions, too. Finally, at yesterday’s press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the imaging had been purely precautionary, intended to “identify any issues early, confirm overall health, and ensure the president maintains long-term vitality and function.” The White House also released details about the scan results, which they said had uncovered nothing concerning. In short: It’s a great MRI. The best MRI. Doctors are saying they’ve never seen an MRI so good.
In real life, doctors were split on the news, with some telling the Washington Post that an MRI is “absolutely not a part of standard preventative imaging” for men of Trump’s age but others saying they are not uncommon as part of an “executive physical.”
Trump, who turns 80 next summer, has faced growing scrutiny over his health all year. It’s a lesson Joe Biden learned pretty recently: Once people start wondering whether you’re getting too old for the job, those feelings only grow over time.
Cheap Shots
While I tend to avoid commenting on people's appearance, in terms of physical characteristics, I concede that in many cases how people look is a window into both their mind and their soul.
Is there any photo of Hegseth in which he does not look like an arrogant, nasty little prick, enjoying power and status as if a birthright? When I look at human images, I first look for warmth and empathy in them. I never see that with him. Those qualities seem utterly lost within him, or not extant at all. Which, I suppose, makes him a perfect candidate to work in this administration. The clear lack of humanity seems to be a prerequisite for any level of responsibility, alongside total fealty to The Leader.
Watching Adm Bradley take this on the chin with his Senate briefing coming up is interesting. What might he say to the Senators? Also, let’s assume Bradley proactively ordered the second strike on the survivors in front of Hegseth, as Gen Hertling pointed out on Twitter, that’s still complicity in a war crime. If you as the senior officer don’t stop your subordinate from committing a war crime, what the fuck are you even doing in charge?