WHAT DROVE THE DC SHOOTER? Three days before an Afghan refugee ambushed two National Guard soldiers in Washington, killing one and critically wounding the other, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin appeared on ABC News to express her fear that members of the Guard would soon attack innocent civilians. “It makes me incredibly nervous,” Slotkin said, “that we’re about to see people in law enforcement, people in uniformed military, get nervous, get stressed, shoot at American civilians.”
Slotkin, of course, had it completely wrong. In real life, the Guard did not attack civilians. A civilian attacked the Guard.
Now there is a debate over whether Slotkin and her Democratic colleagues contributed to the atmosphere in which the attack on the Guard occurred. In this way, Slotkin and her allies repeatedly depicted President Donald Trump’s Guard deployments as an “invasion” in which a dangerous, “authoritarian” president used the military to target everyday Americans. Slotkin and five other Democratic lawmakers, Sen. Mark Kelly and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Chris Deluzio made a widely disseminated video in which they strongly suggested that members of the Guard or active-duty military should disobey the president’s orders on the grounds that the orders were “illegal.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, has repeatedly used the word “invasion” to refer to plans to deploy Guard troops in crime-ridden Chicago. Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, addressing possible Guard deployment in Portland, wrote that “Trump troops are deliberately attacking peaceful protesters to incite violence.” California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters wrote that the “would-be dictator” Trump is “just itching to invoke martial law, and yes, even push for civil war.” The rabidly anti-Trump publication The Atlantic wrote that Trump and his advisers “seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.”
Time after time, Democrats and others in the Resistance accused Trump of plotting to use the Guard to attack Americans. It was a rhetorical campaign that culminated in the “you must refuse an illegal order” video and, finally, to Slotkin’s warning that “we’re about to see” uniformed military “shoot at American civilians.”
Is it any wonder that some unbalanced individual, whether motivated by anti-Trump animus or religious zealotry or some other impulse, would decide to take action before Trump’s troops attacked Americans?
You have undoubtedly seen reports that the motive of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man charged with the DC National Guard attack, remains “unknown.” We do know that American officials say that in Afghanistan, Lakanwal, age 29, provided some unidentified assistance to U.S. forces at some unspecified time before the disastrous 2021 American withdrawal from that country.
FBI Director Kash Patel called the DC shootings a “heinous act of terrorism,” but no official has described precisely what caused Lakanwal to act. Was he influenced by the current anti-Trump political atmosphere? Was he motivated by violent Islamic extremism? Simple hatred of the United States? Some other thing? Whatever Lakanwal’s motive, his feelings manifested themselves in an attack on precisely the people, members of the National Guard, whose deployment had set off so much angry rhetoric from domestic anti-Trump leaders.
Now, the president has taken action that will set off more angry rhetoric from the usual suspects. On the day of the shooting, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced, “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols. The protection and safety of our homeland and of the American people remains our singular focus and mission.”
The warnings came quickly. The New York Times published an article headlined, “Trump Uses National Guard Shooting to Cast Suspicion on Refugees.” Others warned against what they characterized as a Trump-fueled backlash against Afghan refugees in particular. In the days ahead, discussion of that issue will surely steer the political conversation away from the toxic atmosphere in which Lakanwal acted, and the people who, driven by animosity toward the president and perhaps also by political opportunism, helped create that atmosphere.
