A shocking Washington Post story seems to have finally shaken congressional Republicans from their deep partisan slumber. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave instructions to “kill everybody” on a boat allegedly transporting drugs, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima recently reported. The attack was part of an ongoing military operation targeting vessels coming from Venezuela on the grounds that drug traffickers pose a U.S. national security threat.
According to the article, the special operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack authorized a second strike after it became clear there were two survivors of the initial strike. Hegseth has insisted he was not in the room when the decision was made, and government officials also suggested the second strike was justified because the two survivors could have been trying to contact a cartel for help. Under military law, though, the second strike could constitute a war crime.
After the Post article appeared, bipartisan criticism of the administration, along with demands for more information, emerged. Military officials then delivered a classified briefing to the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees during which they played a video of the incident. The session seemed to reassure Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who said he “didn’t see anything disturbing” in the footage and insisted that all the strikes were “entirely lawful and needful, and they were exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do.” Speaking of his panel’s investigation, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers of Alabama, told reporters: “It’s done.”
Other elected officials, however, were far less placated. “I think it’d be hard to watch this series of videos and not be troubled,” Delaware Sen. Chris Coons concluded. Coons said he walked away from the briefing with “more policy questions than ever.”
The outrage over the Sept. 2 incident is only a drop in the bucket compared with the broader concerns about the Trump administration’s decision to conduct any of these lethal attacks in the first place. Even if the boats were carrying narcotics—a claim the administration has not yet proven—the standard procedure would be to rely on the U.S. Coast Guard, which seizes vessels only after issuing multiple warnings and then arrests those on board, sending them either to the United States or their home country for prosecution.
In the minds of the administration’s critics, President Donald Trump’s decision to authorize strikes intended to kill amounts to an unwarranted act of military aggression—murder, some say, committed in the name of the United States.
Regardless of how many Democrats raise red flags and condemn Trump and his administration, nothing will change on Capitol Hill until a few Senate Republicans are finally willing to take a genuine stand—not just offer a few words of mild reprimand. This group of Republican senators will need to launch a full-scale investigation into what the president from their own party is doing. Courageous politicians willing to put country above party will need to initiate a serious and legitimate public inquiry into the Trump administration’s military operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.
Republicans have remained fiercely loyal to Trump since his inauguration in January 2025. But they should now look back almost 60 years ago to the impact made by Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright when, in February 1966, he opened a major investigation into Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s expanding war in Vietnam. Fulbright became one of the earliest critics of the war within the political establishment, offering legitimacy to the activists whose numbers were swelling on college campuses and in the streets.
Fulbright was no radical. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was known as a leading liberal internationalist who was firmly aligned with Johnson’s muscular approach to combating the threat of communism. Fulbright had been an integral voice in the steady expansion of the national security state since the late 1940s and one of Johnson’s most loyal allies.
Indeed, when Johnson requested that Congress pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted him sweeping authority to use military force in Southeast Asia based on questionable evidence of an attack against a U.S. Navy boat, Fulbright personally shepherded the resolution through the Senate. He overcame serious concerns about granting the president such broad power by assuring colleagues that Johnson would return to Congress before undertaking any substantial escalation, and by arguing that they needed to support the resolution to protect the president from being labeled “weak on defense” in the 1964 election.
By early 1966, Fulbright realized he had made a grave mistake and been misled. Statements by Secretary of State Dean Rusk during a closed-door session in January 1996 convinced Fulbright that the Johnson administration was making horrendous decisions based on faulty assumptions about how to fight communism.
In mid-February 1996, Fulbright launched major open hearings about Vietnam in the Senate Caucus Room, a landmark moment in the evolution of the anti-war movement. Although there had been a few small college protests, beginning with the teach-ins at the University of Michigan in 1965, public support for military action in Vietnam remained strong and opposition within Congress was still marginal. Even most civil rights leaders who were skeptical of the war had little interest in linking their movement to a politically unpopular cause.
Rusk, foreign-policy analyst George Kennan, and Gen. Maxwell Taylor all appeared before the committee during the open hearings. Fulbright rejected Rusk’s insistence that the war was necessary to maintain global peace, warning instead that the intervention could easily “trigger” a world war. Responding to Taylor’s adamant defense of the conflict, Fulbright noted: “We have burned a lot of innocent people in this war. I am not blaming you or anyone else for it. It is the nature of war. This is why I would like to find some way to stop it.”
Kennan, in contrast to Rusk and Taylor, expressed stinging criticism of the war. He argued that the United States needed to withdraw “as soon as this could be done without inordinate damage to our prestige or stability in the area.”
Speaking to a reporter as the hearings proceeded, Fulbright expressed open regret about his role in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. “You see, we never had a creeping war like this,” he said. “Until quite recently we didn’t think it was a war at all: We thought it was an aid program.”
Key to the hearings was the decision by the three major television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, to cover portions of the sessions despite frustration among high-level executives who did not want to cancel lucrative sitcoms, soap operas, and game shows. “Senator Fulbright’s official ‘teach-in’ on Vietnam has been quite a show,” New York Times columnist James Reston observed, with “big lights for the TV cameras up front in the Senate caucus room, big shots and their decorative wives out back, and growls of protest about ‘the little band of willful men’ from the White House.” At CBS, news division head Fred Friendly pushed back against the commercial concerns of his bosses to secure as much airtime as possible given the importance of what was being discussed. When a network vice president finally shut down the coverage, Friendly resigned on Feb. 15, 1966.
Johnson, who kept three televisions running in the Oval Office so that he could monitor all the network news, hated what he saw. In private, he lashed out and mocked his colleague as “Senator Halfbright” (an insult coined by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy). Johnson advisor Joseph Califano recalled how the president quipped, “For a Rhodes scholar to say that he didn’t know what was in [the Tonkin] resolution is more than this hillbilly will ever believe.”
The hearings damaged the president’s political standing. Although public approval of Johnson remained steady, Fulbright emerged as the first mainstream senator to articulate his opposition to the war. The internationalist southerner, deeply admired in Washington, could not be easily dismissed. Just as important, the news media was watching. The questions that the hearings opened up did not disappear. Reporters continued digging, eventually uncovering many of the deceptions, lies, and falsehoods that had shielded U.S. citizens from the harsh realities of what was unfolding in Southeast Asia.
“The February hearings,” Randall Woods wrote in his landmark biography of the senator, “opened a psychological door for the great American middle class …. If the administration intended to wage the war in Vietnam from the political center in America, the 1966 hearings were indeed a blow to that effort.”
In spring 1966, Fulbright delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins University, later published as a book, in which he condemned the “arrogance of power” driving U.S. national security decision-makers. Fulbright explained that he questioned “the ability of the United States, or France or any other Western nation, to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy … where there is no tradition of it and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life.”
Following a private discussion with the president in June, an exchange Robert Dallek recounts in Flawed Giant, in which Johnson tried to win Fulbright back given his influence in the Senate, the Arkansan senator returned to Capitol Hill deeply troubled. He told colleagues that Johnson was no longer acting rationally. He feared the president was capable of doing something very dangerous overseas.
Over time, more Democrats from the left and center joined the chorus of legislators condemning the war, investigating the administration, and even demanding spending cuts. Fulbright kept holding hearings and making speeches, each more critical than the last. Though these representatives and senators were only one part of a much larger coalition that fought the war and ultimately brought U.S. involvement in Vietnam to an end in 1973, the presence of establishment Democrats within the movement was essential. They lent the protests greater legitimacy and endowed the opposition with real political power.
In 2025, the chances of any Republican replicating Fulbright’s record remain slim. In a hyperpolarized political party, congressional Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated how much they are willing to tolerate from the president so long as he enhances their prospects for reelection. Once the party crossed the Rubicon of accepting that participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection did not disqualify Trump from presidential candidacy, it became virtually impossible to imagine anything that would sever the umbilical cord binding Republicans on Capitol Hill to the Oval Office.
But U.S. politics can take unexpected turns. This is especially true as more lawmakers on Capitol Hill begin to view the president as a lame duck—one with whom association carries greater political risk than reward.
The severity of the administration’s lethal military operations against these boats has so far caused some Republicans to cringe and a few others to quietly consult their moral compass. Yet thoughts and prayers do not produce change. Representatives and Senators can. Reining in what many agree has been an imperial presidency will take a courageous Republican.
