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.

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,