Responding to the news that a crazed asylee from Afghanistan had shot two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., the New Yorker's Jane Mayer concluded that the attack was "so tragic" and "so unnecessary," before proceeding to identify the real culprit of the abomination: President Donald J. Trump. "These poor guardsmen," wrote Mayer, "should never have been deployed."
In this ugly asseveration, Mayer was swiftly joined by a bunch of other political commentators, each more desperate than the last to train their fire on the current occupant of the White House. In The Atlantic, Juliette Kayyem wrote that "there are costs to performatively deploying members of the military, one of which is the risk of endangering them." On Twitter, the author John Pavlovitz explicitly proposed that "Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are culpable for endangering the National Guard by putting them in harm's way." Not to be outdone, MS NOW's Ken Dilanian followed this path to its revolting terminus by suggesting that the guardsmen were "walking around with uniforms in an American city," that "there are some Americans that might object to that," and "so, apparently, this shooting has happened."
