The denials came fast, but not fast enough. Within hours of a bombshell Washington Post report alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered troops to “kill everybody” after a strike on a Venezuelan speedboat, the White House and Pentagon were scrambling to shift the blame onto someone else – Admiral Mitch Bradley, the commander of U.S. Special Operations.

According to veterans, lawyers, and longtime observers, this is the moment many of them knew was coming. As former Navy pilot Ken Harbaugh puts it, the Trump regime is doing exactly what authoritarian governments always do when the truth starts to catch up with them: find a fall guy and throw him under the nearest bus.

Make no mistake, Admiral Bradley is no innocent bystander. Military officers have a duty to refuse illegal orders. But veterans like Chris Goldsmith, founder of Veterans Fighting Fascism and host of the On Offense podcast, are warning that the public cannot let the people at the very top – Hegseth and Trump – slither out of responsibility for what critics say looks like an unlawful double-tap strike that blew apart shipwrecked survivors clinging to wreckage in the Caribbean.

Back in September, Hegseth himself bragged on camera that he watched the engagement live. “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing,” he said, almost gleefully. That now-chilling quote is quickly becoming Exhibit A for those arguing this wasn’t confusion in the fog of war – it was deliberate.

Goldsmith flatly rejects the administration’s entire premise. “We’re not at war,” he says. These boats can’t even reach U.S. shores. There’s no evidence they’re packed with explosives or advanced weapons. Yet the Trump team slapped the label “narco-terrorists” on cartels and started using military force where law enforcement tactics are supposed to apply. “They’re firing on unarmed ships from afar with weapons meant for real threats,” he warns – and using a fake state of war to justify it.

Under U.S. law, service members are bound not just by the Uniform Code of Military Justice but by federal, state, and international law. Shooting dazed, unarmed men hanging onto wreckage is nowhere in the rulebook of acceptable force. That is why legal experts and veterans alike are using words like “murder” and “execution,” not “accident” or “miscommunication.”

And the danger, they say, doesn’t stop at sea. The same logic being used to justify “kinetic strikes” against alleged narco-terrorists is being echoed at home. This administration has already branded Antifa and broader anti-fascist movements as “domestic terrorists.” Goldsmith points out the terrifying slope: if they can call a cartel a terrorist group to get around due process abroad, what stops them from using the same excuse against Americans in the streets?

It’s not theoretical anymore. Court filings show DHS Secretary Noem pushing ahead with deportation flights even after being warned that a judge’s order made them illegal. People sent to the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” facility are now unaccounted for. Experts in fascism – people Goldsmith personally knows – are literally leaving the country because they see the writing on the wall.

And yet, Goldsmith refuses to surrender to despair. He admits that as a young soldier fresh from Iraq, he once believed in hitting cartels with military force. That was “the logic of a high school student who only knows war,” he says – and now he watches, horrified, as that same simplistic thinking drives U.S. policy at the highest levels. “We’re being run by people who never grew out of that mindset,” he warns. 

Then comes Hegseth’s carefully crafted social media post: a glowing tribute to Admiral Mitch Bradley as an “American hero” with his “100% support.” On the surface, it looks like loyalty. To Goldsmith, it reads like a neon sign flashing FALL GUY. You don’t keep repeating one commander’s name, he says, unless you’re trying to shift the spotlight off yourself.

But there’s a problem with that strategy: this wasn’t the only strike. Whistleblowers are already coming forward. The Washington Post piece naming dates, ships, and commanders is just the opening salvo. Goldsmith says he’s personally connecting insiders with congressional investigators. He promises more ugly details are coming – more missions, more illegal orders, more bodies.

He’s blunt about where this could lead. He believes Hegseth is on a path to prison unless Trump issues some blanket pardon “for all federal crimes he may have committed ever in his life.” And even then, he insists, Democrats must be ready to impeach Hegseth, because cabinet secretaries are not untouchable. “This cannot become the new normal,” he warns.

Unlike Trump, Hegseth doesn’t have a cult-sized base to protect him. When even Republicans like Rand Paul are calling the strike a war crime, Goldsmith doubts the Senate would save him the way it saved Trump. Meanwhile, veterans are already organizing, defending leaders like Senator Mark Kelly who dared remind troops of their oath to the Constitution—not to a man.

For Harbaugh, Goldsmith, and the growing chorus of veterans speaking out, the message is simple: the regime might try to throw the military under the bus—but this time, the people who took an oath to defend the Constitution are ready to push back. And if the whistleblowers are right, this “one strike” may soon look like the opening chapter of a much darker story.