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11/29/25

11/29/2025

THERE ARE TWO VILLAINS IN THE D.C. SHOOTINGS:
THE GUNMAN, WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER; AND A PRESIDENT, WHO TURNED SOLDIERS INTO TARGETS

TRUMP, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference on Thanksgiving Day, at which he called a reporter a "stupid person" for questioning his version of the D.C. shootings. PHOTO CREDIT: Screenshot of PBS NewsHour video

DONALD TRUMP DID NOT KILL SARAH BECKSTROM, the West Virginia National Guard specialist who died on Thanksgiving Day.
Nor did Trump shoot Andrew Wolfe, the Air Force staff sergeant, who as of this writing, was in critical condition with his wounds.
The man who allegedly pulled the trigger on Nov. 26 was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan refugee who helped the Central Intelligence Agency during the Afghanistan war,
But President Donald John Trump, the commander-in-chief, put Beckstrom and Wolfe in harm’s way when he brought 2,000 National Guard troops into Washington, D.C. last August.
What’s more, military commanders knew that Trump was placing the Guard’s men and women in peril.
The Guard, which was supposed to boost crime-fighting in the capitol, would be “a target of opportunity” for terrorists and others, the experts said
And it was no secret. Military officials had outlined their worries in memos that surfaced in a court case against the D.C. deployment of the Guard.
Trump, of course, is taking no responsibility for any of this.
Quite the opposite.
He’s exploiting the tragedy, spreading the blame to lots of other people, while stirring hatred and fear throughout the country.
There’s his favorite scapegoat, former President Joe Biden, whom he charges with allowing Lakanwal and other Afghans, who helped the U.S. war efforts, into the U.S.; there’s a reporter who questioned Trump’s version of events, calling her a “stupid person;” and there’s the thousands of immigrants Trump is branding as security threats to the U.S.
It gets more alarming and absurd.
Trump has ordered 500 more Guard troops into Washington, so now there will be even more "targets of opportunity."
And, according to the Washington Post, apparently the National Guard forces will be “paired” with Washington, D.C. law enforcement personnel – in other words, the local cops will be protecting the Guard, instead of the other way around.

LIKE LOTS OF OTHERS, I was expecting trouble when Trump sent the National Guard to Washington, Los Angeles and other cities. But I figured it would come from missteps by the Guard itself, along the lines of the long-ago Kent State University shootings.
That was in 1970, when four students were shot to death and nine others wounded as the Ohio National Guard turned its guns on innocent people during a Vietnam War protest.
But according to the New York Times and other news sources, the military this time was worried – correctly – that Trump’s deployments would make the Guard’s men and women targets.
Commanders warned that the soldiers were now in a “heightened threat environment.” The Times reported a memo that said that “nefarious threat actors engaging in grievance based violence and those inspired by foreign terrorist organizations” might see the National Guard as “a target of opportunity.”
The memo showed up in a lawsuit against the deployment by Brian Schwalb, the District of Columbia attorney general. The Times said that second memo warned that Guard’s presence “presents an opportunity for criminals, violent extremists, issue motivated groups and lone actors to advance their interests.”
We don’t know what category Lakanwal fits into, if, as seems likely, he turns out to be the shooter.
He is reported by the Times and others to have been part of a “Zero Unit” which worked with the CIA in Afghanistan, protecting American interests. Human rights groups say such units used extreme and illegal tactics, which the CIA has denied.
The units helped the U.S.’s chaotic withdrawal in 2001, and Lakanwal and thousands of others were brought to the U.S. during the Biden years, and he was granted asylum by the Trump administration in April. News reports say Lakanwal was vetted several times.

AT HIS MAR-A-LAGO ESTATE, Trump was at his most vicious and disingenuous on Thanksgiving Day as he met the media, including Nancy Cordes of CBS News, whose questions inflamed the president.
This transcript is from a video posted on YouTube by the PBS NewsHour:

REPORTER: A question about this tragic shooting in Washington, DC. U.S. officials say that the suspect worked very closely with the CIA in Afghanistan for years, that he was vetted and the vetting came up clean.
TRUMP: He went cuckoo; I mean he went nuts, and that happens, too. That happens too often with these people. You see them, but look, this is how they come in. This is how they're, they're standing on top of each other and that's an airplane. (Trump holds up a photo of the interior of an overcrowded airplane)
There was no vetting or anything. They came in unvetted, and we have a lot of others in this country. We're going to get them out. But they go cuckoo. Something happens to them.
REPORTER: Your DOJ (Department of Justice) IG (inspector general) just reported this year that there was thorough vetting by DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and by the FBI of these Afghans, who were brought into the U.S. So why do you think that the Biden administration (is to blame)?
TRUMP: Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in to, on a plane, along with thousands of other people that shouldn't be here, and you're just asking questions because you're a stupid person.
And we, there's a law passed that it's almost impossible not to, to get them out. You can't get them out once they come in. And they came in, and they were unvetted, they were unchecked, there were many of them and they came on our big planes. And it was disgraceful. And if you look, you'll see there was a law passed that makes it almost impossible not to let them in, not to certify them, so to speak, once they come in. And they came in and they shouldn't have come in.
And frankly, the whole thing was a mess. The whole Afghanistan situation was a mess. We shouldn't, it should have never have taken place.

WHAT SHOULDN’T HAVE TAKEN PLACE was the shooting of the two members of the National Guard.
The soldiers shouldn’t have been in Washington at all.
The shootings were monstrous, and the gunman deserves the full punishment of the law.
But just as culpable is the president of the United States, who turned soldiers into targets and now is exploiting their fate in order to bring more chaos and shame to the country.

These news sources were used in preparing this post:

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11/20/25

11/20/2025

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TRUMP’S ASSAULT ON A “TERRIBLE” REPORTER: A REMINDER THAT POLITICS WORK WHEN THEY'RE PERSONAL

SAUDI CROWN PRINCE Mohammed bin Salman, left, and President Donald J. Trump at the Oval Office Nov. 18 where Trump trashed a reporter whose questions he didn't like. PHOTO CREDIT - C-Span screenshot

SITTING NEXT TO A MAN who knows a thing or two about silencing a journalist, Donald Trump unloaded a barrage of insults, slurs and threats at a White House reporter.
“You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter,” Trump admonished Mary Bruce, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, during a Nov. 18 question and answer session in the Oval Office.
As a once-working reporter myself, although not at the White House level, the president’s attacks on Mary Bruce made me furious. It felt personal.
Granted, Trump did not, as he had a few days earlier with different woman reporter, address Bruce as “Piggy.”
But in multiple exchanges, Trump savaged Bruce professionally and personally, and threatened government action to undermine the viability of the entire ABC network.
“… I think the way you ask a question with the anger and the meanness is terrible. You ought to go back and learn how to be a reporter. No more questions from you.”
Looking on was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, of Saudi Arabia, who allegedly knows firsthand how to ensure that a troublesome journalist asks “no more questions.”
The prince is suspected by a variety of intelligence sources of ordering the gruesome 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.
A 15-person Saudi hit squad, including members of the prince’s bodyguard detail, are believed to have subdued Khashoggi with a drug, then used a plastic bag to suffocate him. His body was sawed into pieces for easier transport out of the facility.
Now, seven years later in the Oval Office, Trump was attacking another reporter, and incidentally, exonerating the Saudi prince from his murderous history.
“You know, it’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude,” Trump told Bruce. “I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man (the prince) who’s highly respected, asking him a horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.”

It should be noted that Bruce’s questions were neither unexpected nor shrill, only touching on the leading subjects of the day, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the fact of a once-shunned prince was appearing in the Oval Office.
“As far as this gentleman is concerned, he’s done a phenomenal job,” Trump said of the prince.
But not so much the murdered columnist.
“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen. But he (the prince) knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking him a question like that.”

MARY BRUCE, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, whose questions were rebuked by President Trump. PHOTO CREDIT: C-Span screenshot

Trump went on a rant about how Epstein had given money to Democrats, but nothing to him.
“People are wise to the hoax, and ABC, your company, your crappy company, is one of the perpetrators. And I’ll tell you something, I’ll tell you something – I think the license should be taken away from ABC, because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong.”
Outrageous.
You’d expect the president of the United States to be against murder. But here he defends the man allegedly behind the grotesque Khashoggi killing.
You’d expect the president of the United States to defend the victim – Khashoggi was a United States resident as well as a Saudi critic. But here he blames the victim, suggesting the columnist had it coming.
You’d expect the president of the United States to be horrified by the details of the bizarre killing. Instead, he passes it off as just another of those things that “happen” in one’s life.
You’d expect that the president of the United States would understand the role of journalists, professionally required to ask relevant questions of those in power, especially dictators. Instead, he suggests the obligation of a reporter was to play Oval Office hostess, worried about embarrassing a guest, rather than carrying out her journalistic duties.

IF YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR, you might have some objections with my singling out this particular outrage.
Surely, browbeating a reporter is hardly the worst of Donald Trump’s sins, especially during the awful months of his second term.
How about the people who will die or suffer because of lack of federal money for medical care, housing and food? How about the people snatched off city streets by masked thugs, then imprisoned and later deported?
What about people in other countries dying after American medical aid was halted?
How about farmers whose iffy economics have been upended by tariffs? Transsexuals denied employment and medical care as the government has turned them into pariahs? How about people who are drowned in floods and incinerated by wildfires because of worsening climate change, accelerated by Trump’s war on science?
Guilty, on all counts.
My outrage is personal if not downright selfish.
I feel for Mary Bruce because I know what it’s like when a news source attacks a reporter, challenging her or his credibility, freezing access to sources and information.
Reporters are – news flash – people.
They want to be liked, welcomed, praised. They don’t want to be yelled at, made fun of, degraded, rebuked, shunned, mocked, have their integrity and tradecraft challenged and their corporate boss’s economic viability undermined.
And surely, no reporter wants to be drugged, suffocated and sawed by into pieces.
So, you can understand how a career journalist might sympathize with Catherine Lucey, the Bloomberg News reporter who had asked Trump aboard Air Force One about the Epstein case, only to be told: “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!” And then this week’s fusillade against the “terrible reporter” Mary Bruce in the Oval Office.

SELF-CENTERED, FOR SURE. But also, politically potent.
My guess is that every American will have a personal grievance with Trump before his term is over – perhaps, before his first year in office is completed.
It’s one thing to be opposed philosophically, politically, theoretically, to Donald Trump’s many attacks on democracy, civil society, science, racial justice, the environment and the Constitution.
But it’s quite a different proposition when a Trump offense becomes personal to you as an individual, or your family, your clan, your profession, neighbor or friend – when it gets under your skin, when it hits home, when it becomes real.
Already, millions of Americans have been touched directly by Trump’s abuses. Researchers whose life-changing experiments have been cut short. Black men and women feeling the invisible but real bite of Trump’s racism. Physicians and their patients when the administration makes vaccinations suspect. Parents shopping for groceries.
It’s true I identify with how it feels to be belittled, mocked, insulted, slandered and intimidated by a news source simply because a journalist is doing his or her job.
But our best hope for preserving American democracy is when every one of us understands that we have an actual stake in the outcome.
That’s when we are likely to donate, participate and most importantly, remember to vote.
Politics works best when they become personal.

Here are links to some of the sourced used in this post:

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11/10/25

11/10/2025

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HERE’S HOPING:
* THE NOV. 4 VOTE PREDICTS FUTURE ELECTIONS;
* TRUMP SUFFERS REBUKE BEFORE FADING AWAY

TRUMP ASLEEP? A screenshot of California Gov. Gavin Newsom's X account showing the president seemingly asleep at an Oval Office event. Click on the image to see the X posting.

SO WHY DON’T I FEEL BETTER?
A week after the election, why don’t I feel the joy?
After all, “we” won, and won big, coast to coast.
Could it be that the Democrats are, in fact, alive and capable of actually winning?
And then there’s fresh chatter about a sleepy president – Donald Trump unable to keep his eyes open during a much photographed Oval Office event four days ago.
Could it be that Trump, approaching 80, is feeling the weight of the years and might simply slip away before his term is up?

Both the election dynamics and the reports of a drowsy commander-in-chief are tests of hope, that essential, but painful emotion that confronts us, both as spectators and players, in the struggle for democracy.
The election results teases us by suggesting that our hope that democracy will endure is not wishful thinking. But the fear is that it will turn out to be a false hope.
Meanwhile, for me, Trump’s diminished capacity challenges my hope that Trump will finish his term, so that he can earn the public and political rebuke that may be his greatest fear. Fading away would be too easy an escape for such a wicked man.

THE NOV. 4 ELECTION was a delicious political feast.
Take New Jersey, where the pre-election surveys showed a “tightening” race. Except that Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for governor, won a stunning victory, with 56.5 percent of the vote.

THE DEMOCRATS’ INEVITABLE SHUTDOWN DEFEAT
The capitulation by Democratic Senators last night to end the government shutdown is clearly a disappointment and possibly a betrayal of their party and its millions of supporters.
At the same time, I never thought the shutdown made sense, because there was no clear path to “success,” how the tactic would force Republicans to agree to ease health care costs.
As to people who said this was a rare, necessary choice for the minority party to flex its muscles, I think screwing up the machinery of government would never turn out to be true leverage.
Now, the Democrats are double losers: millions have been hurt by having their pay disrupted, food benefits upended; and the Democrats have gained nothing but humiliation and division.
It was always going to end this way.

Slightly bigger ( but still hugely), was the win by Abigail Spanberger in her Virginia governor’s race, 57.1 percent.
Zohran Mamdani organized a huge, enthusiastic turnout in New York City, hopefully driving the despicable Andrew Cuomo and his horror-movie mug off the public stage for good.
On the Other Coast, the complicated, brazen effort, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, to jury-rig California voting districts, captured 63.9 percent vote to create new Democratic U.S. House seats. The plot was to checkmate the Trump-GOP effort to invent five new Republican seats in Texas.
And in Pennsylvania, three Democratic state Supreme Court justices held their posts by 27-point margins.
So last Tuesday was a Big, Beautiful Day for truth, justice and the American way.
All of which put the lie to widespread anxiety about a dispirited, ineffective resistance to Donald Trump by a defective, damaged Democratic Party.
Again the question, a week after the election, why don’t I feel the joy?

SUPERSTITION is part of the answer.
I have mixed feelings about religion, but am devoted to idiotic superstitions about Friday the 13th, wandering under ladders, and jinxing no-hitters by declaring no-hitter -in-the-making before the final out. So the jubilation that followed the election seems to me downright treacherous by tempting evil spirits.
Think of all the awful things that can happen with an election still a full year away.
Trump could – and probably will – try to hijack or monkeywrench the voting process.
He could – and probably will - try to declare martial law.
He might designate the Democratic Party a terrorist organization. And so forth.
Meanwhile, the Democrats might do what they sometimes seem to do best: self-destruct.
The Democrats could splinter, declare war on progressives, bore the nation with ineffectual centrists' righteousness.
Mamdani could turn out to be the inept, inexperienced, foot-in-the-mouth twerp that the New York Times and the rest of the media have made him out to be, dragging the actual Democratic Party down with him.
Democratic Doom and its scenarios are endless, and we are well warned that paranoia is both obligatory and well-founded.

BUT HERE’S THE THING. In the election’s wake, Donald Trump seems strangely diminished.
I don’t know whether this is a consequence of the election, or whether Trump at long last is beginning to seem mortal. He is months away from turning 80 – an age where death lurks as a reality everyday, instead of somewhere in the vague future.
He seems more vulnerable – politically and physically.
For the first time, members of Congress are showing spasms of resistance – for example dismissing Trump’s call for the Senate to abandon its 60 vote rule that gives the minority party veto power over much legislation.
He’s doing poorly in the polls. The public blames Republicans for the shutdown, even though the Democrats are full partners (See the above sidebar). The election is widely believed to have been about “affordability,” high prices being something that Trump promised to end, but cannot control or wish away.
And maybe the man is simply wearing out.
My wife pointed out a weekend article in the Washington Post that I missed, and I bet you did to, because Post seemed to downplay it, at least on its website, and the rest of the media ignored it, maybe because of fear of Trump, maybe due to professional jealousy, maybe both.
The Post’s article reported that Trump “seemed” variously to be trying not to fall asleep and actually falling asleep in a widely observed Oval Office event. CLICK HERE to follow the link (the Post has a pay wall) to the article.
The piece was about the occasion on Nov. 6 when Trump announced that pharmaceutical companies agreed to lower prices for weight-loss drugs. The Post wrote:

“Sitting behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, the president displayed a constellation of movements familiar to anyone who has attempted to stay awake during a work meeting. He closed his eyes. He put his hand to his temple. He slouched in his chair.”

Personally, I hope that this is not going to be how justice comes for Donald Trump.
I don’t want him to fade away, succumb to a fatal disease, trip on the Air Force One ramp or to be assassinated.
Instead, I want him to hang around to be renounced, rebuked and rejected.
Impeachment would be perfect, but won’t happen. Instead, it would be nice if the voters turned on him. It would be great if the Democrats took the House next year and checkmated his campaign of terror.
The best outcome would be for his administration to fail, for the nation to vote against the party that has sustained him and return the political system to working condition, so that the word “Trump” becomes a universal slur.
Last week’s election showed us that that’s possible, even if it’s a long shot and a long way off.
So, here’s hoping Donald Trump won’t simply nod off without giving the public a chance to understand and condemn the many ways he’s damaged their lives and their country.
Rejection is Donald Trump’s nightmare; but for the rest of us, it’s an American dream.

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11/29/25

THERE ARE TWO VILLAINS IN THE D.C. SHOOTINGS:THE GUNMAN, WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER; AND A PRESIDENT, WHO TURNED SOLDIERS INTO TARGETS

11/20/25

TRUMP’S ASSAULT ON A “TERRIBLE” REPORTER: A REMINDER THAT POLITICS WORK WHEN THEY'RE PERSONAL

11/10/25

HERE’S HOPING: * THE NOV. 4 VOTE PREDICTS FUTURE ELECTIONS;* TRUMP SUFFERS REBUKE BEFORE FADING AWAY

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THERE ARE TWO VILLAINS IN THE D.C. SHOOTINGS:
THE GUNMAN, WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER; AND A PRESIDENT, WHO TURNED SOLDIERS INTO TARGETS

HERE’S HOPING:
* THE NOV. 4 VOTE PREDICTS FUTURE ELECTIONS;
* TRUMP SUFFERS REBUKE BEFORE FADING AWAY