Trump trades on tragedy he created

The bitter fruits of a harvest sown in haste and opportunism are now being counted in American blood.

A young soldier, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, is dead.

Another, Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, fights for his life.

They were not struck down on a foreign battlefield, but on a street in the shadow of the White House, victims of an ambush by a man whose presence here is a testament to a cycle of political hypocrisy so profound it defies reason.

The alleged gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, did not sneak across a forgotten border. He was a known quantity, a man who fought in the CIA’s shadowy “Zero Units” in Afghanistan.

His path to America was paved not by lawlessness, but by policy—first in the chaotic evacuation following a withdrawal dictated by draft-dodging President Donald Trump’s 2020 surrender to the Taliban, and then, astonishingly, by the granting of asylum under this very administration in April of this year.

This is the central, grotesque contradiction of the moment: the man who now vilifies all migrants as a blight welcomed this specific one, a man forged in the very crucible of a failed war.

The administration that points a trembling finger at a prior administration’s “disastrous withdrawal” conveniently forgets it was their own leader who invited the Taliban to Camp David and signed the agreement that made the frantic airlift a foregone conclusion.

And from this tangled web of his own making, the President has chosen not introspection, but a sweeping and vengeful new crusade.

He has declared war on the very idea of the American promise, vowing to “permanently pause migration” from nations he disdains, to “denaturalize” those who displease him, and to deport anyone deemed “non-compatible with Western civilization.”

It is a vision of America where the lamp beside the golden door is not merely extinguished, but replaced with a searchlight and a neo-Nazi loyalty oath.

He has deployed our citizen-soldiers as props in this political theater, placing them in the role of urban police on the streets of the capital, a precarious duty for which they were never intended.

The most sobering fact about Wednesday’s slayings is that the alleged killer, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was a product of American foreign policy, not Afghan culture.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed Lakanwal was a “member of a partner force in Kandahar.” Further reporting identifies him as a member of the CIA’s “Zero Units”—shadowy death squads the U.S. funded and directed during its longest war.

His shooting spree appears not to be the result of importing Afghan culture to America, but of importing America’s covert war culture back home.

This is the reality of blowback: violence returning as an unintended consequence of U.S. policy. Until we confront this, we will fail to prevent the next tragedy.

The tragic, predictable result is that two National Guard soldiers have now paid the ultimate price for a mission born more of political posturing than public safety.

So we are left with a scene of profound national sickness.

A soldier is dead. Another is wounded. A suspect, trained to kill and vetted by American intelligence, is now sedated on a ventilator.

And President Trump, whose own decisions helped create this very chain of events, is using the resulting grief to call for the dismantling of America’s legacy as a nation of immigrants and surge in his illegal military occupation of the capital city.

Trump, whose political success is founded on vilifying Muslim immigrants and supplying weapons used to slaughter thousands of Muslim children in Gaza, now aims to ban newcomers and increase military forces illegally occupying the District of Columbia.

It is a spectacle that would be tragic if it were not so calculated, a cynical dance on a grave that his own policies helped to dig.