This is not a tragedy — it is an atrocity. The voting public should and likely will regard it as such.
Two uniformed U.S. National Guard personnel were shot in the head in broad daylight on the streets of Washington D.C. on Wednesday. Their attacker was an Afghan national who was one of the roughly 200,000 Afghans brought into the United States in a slapdash fashion following Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Central Asia in 2021. His asylum application began under Biden, but it was certified while Donald Trump was in office. He might have been subject to additional scrutiny had Congress passed the Afghan Adjustment Act, which was introduced in both chambers of Congress but never passed. In short, anyone who wants to blame their domestic political opponents for this act of bloodshed will encounter a target-rich environment.
What no one in good faith could argue is that this terrorist attack – and it was a terror attack, designed to intimidate and suppress American law enforcement – was inspired by the provocative presence of uniformed military personnel on the District’s streets. But that is what some claimed.
This is so tragic, so unnecessary, these poor guardsmen should never have been deployed. I live in DC and watched as they had virtually nothing to do but pick up trash. It was for political show and at what a cost. https://t.co/ABkOHNHAvG
— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) November 26, 2025
That ghoulish response to atrocity was shared by MS Now’s, formerly MSNBC’s, Ken Dilanian just minutes after the shooting. After all, “there’s so much controversy happening in the United States right now with ICE,” he said, “who are also wearing uniforms and wearing masks. You don’t know, people walking around with uniforms in an American city. There are some Americans that might object to that. And so apparently this shooting has happened.”
He wasn’t offering a moral judgment on the attack exactly, and sometimes you have to vamp on cable news – filling the dead air with words and trying not to hang yourself in the process. But it is, nevertheless, perverse to blame the Guardsmen for their own brutal shooting.
What can be said for certain is that, in the absence of Biden’s withdrawal and Congress’s lethargy, it would have been far less likely that this terror attack would have occurred. Far too many Americans own those inauspicious acts, and the blame that goes around is diluted as a result. But this is not a tragedy — it is an atrocity. The voting public should and likely will regard it as such.