Music City sent a message all the way up the I-81 to Washington, DC, and president Donald Trump from Tuesday night’s Tennessee election and it wasn’t necessarily a rendition of Dolly’s I Will Always Love You.
In the end, Matt van Epps, the Republican candidate for the vacant House seat left by Mark Green’s retirement in June, held on. But the nervily thin margin made for a startling contrast from the whopping 22-point win that Trump commanded in the predominantly rural 7th district the presidential election last November.
That could be reflective of Trump’s magnetism among steadfast GOP voters – he was not, after all, on the ballot – and the reality that a one-off congressional election for a notionally “safe” seat was never going to break voting records on a perishing November day.
Instead, the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, was banking on the party’s sudden resurgent mood gripping the liberal-leaning, affluent neighbourhoods of Nashville to inflate the overall voting numbers in her favour. She ran a better race than would have seemed possible in June but still trailed with 75 per cent of the votes counted and the Republican candidate holding a 53-45 per cent lead.
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“Our message resonated across the district that Washington is not working for working families,” Behn said at that stage.
“The votes are still coming in but we overperformed in the places we needed to and lost less in the places we needed to.”
The result means that the GOP holds its slender three-seat advantage in the House but it will sharpen the focus ahead of the midterms next year.
On Tuesday afternoon, Trump hosted his final cabinet meeting of 2025, a marathon three-hour affair in which the various support-cast members offered a sales-pitch briefing of departmental accomplishments over the year even as most of the focus was concentrated on Pete Hegseth.
The defence secretary offered a robust defence for the September 2nd US missile strike on an alleged Venezuelan gunboat. The revelation emerged that two people who had survived the first strike were subsequently killed in a second strike, which Democratic politicians and some legal experts say could constitute a war crime.
Hegseth told the gathering in the Cabinet Room that the boat’s cargo was part of a drugs scourge that is causing “an intentional poisoning of American people, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. So, the president had the courage to designate these cartels. Now a number of us here spent a number of years in the military fighting terrorists like al-Qaeda and Isis on the other side of the world”.
Is Trump starting a war with Venezuela?
“How do you treat al-Qaeda and Isis? Do you arrest them, pat them on the head and say don’t do that again or do you end the problem by taking a lethal, kinetic approach. And that’s the way president Trump has authorised the war department to look at these cartels. And I wish everyone could be in the room watching our professionals. Our professionals like Mitch Bradley.”
Not for the first time in recent days, secretary Hegseth name-checked his admiral and made it clear that it was Bradley who had made the call to fire on the vessel for a second time.
“I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, in the department of war we’ve got a lot of things to do. So, I didn’t stick around for the hour, or two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation occurs. So, I moved on to my next meeting. Twelve hours later I learned that commander had made the order. He sunk the boat and eliminated the threat. It was the right call. We have his back.
“I did not personally see survivors,” he then clarified.
“Cos the thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices; you are up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post. ‘I’ll kill everybody’ – phrases from anonymous sources not based on anything. And then you want to throw really irresponsible terms about real American heroes.”
Within hours, Democrats were clamouring to make the point that Hegseth had, in effect, thrown Bradley under the bus. Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator who is under investigation for “potential court martial” on Hegseth’s order, was particularly scathing on Tuesday night and confirmed that he had not been contacted in relation to the apparent investigation.
“The only notification I have received about this was Pete Hegseth’s tweet. Which say everything you need to know about this guy. He’s not serious. He cares more about views on his Twitter account than the law about process. He’s an unserious and unqualified individual who should never have been allowed within a thousand yards of the Pentagon.
“This guy is not a leader. This guy is by far the least qualified secretary of defence we have ever had. He runs around the stage talking about lethality and the warrior ethos and hunting and killing people. That is not the words of a responsible secretary of defence.”
The controversy will revive the debate about Hegseth’s suitability to the role of running the Pentagon. Three Republican senators voted against in his January confirmation, creating a 50-50 deadlock which vice-president JD Vance settled with his deciding vote. Within weeks, Hegseth was embroiled in the Signal-gate controversy over the sharing of details of a military operation in Yemen on a messaging app. House Democrats have vowed to further investigate the boat-bombing.
Meantime, both Republican and Democratic strategists will read the tea leaves in the returns from the Tennessee heartland rural counties such as Benton and Humphreys. Do the weaker Republican voting returns suggest new flickers of doubt among the Maga faithful who are still experiencing the same punishing prices for food and insurances that Trump promised to ease? Or is this Democratic revival just a midwinter aberration? The fog of war, indeed.
