The legacy media seemed to all be reading from the same playbook regarding the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., by an Afghan migrant.
First, blame Donald Trump.
Second, eliminate all other more obvious, but less politically convenient, sources of blame.
Exhibit A: USA Today, which a high school teacher of mine once dismissed as “the newspaper for those without the attention spans for late local TV news.” Their headline regarding the Wednesday attack — which killed one National Guard member and critically wounded another — was flagrantly unsubtle:
Trump sent National Guard to DC to fight crime. Then two were shot https://t.co/Yb7XWGlqWD
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 28, 2025
The Wall Street Journal, by contrast — not the sort of paper that indifferent hotel staff used to plop outside your door as a complimentary wake-up call, back in the days where that was a thing — opted for a tad more subtlety. Their Friday editorial, “The Ambush on the National Guard,” ceded the shooter’s alleged radicalization as a question worth probing but also urged against actually questioning post-conflict Afghan migration in any kind of serious manner.
In other words: Don’t blame Trump, but don’t blame the Afghan migrants that swarmed the United States under President Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome in 2021, either.
The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was an Afghan national who served with a CIA-backed counterterrorism unit in Kandahar before entering the U.S. amid the chaotic withdrawal that handed Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Trump swiftly demanded a full revetting of Afghan entrants and a migration pause from high-risk nations. The Daily Wire reported Friday that the State Department had already instructed overseas posts to halt visas for eligible Afghan nationals pending “updated enhanced vetting or screening measures” to verify identities and eligibility.
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, said that it was worth examining “alleged turn from partner to terrorist, especially as a husband and father of five in the U.S., is an important question to answer” — but we shouldn’t start by blaming the Afghans:
President Trump immediately linked the shooting to Joe Biden’s Afghan debacle, and officials were quick to denounce the lack of adequate vetting in the evacuation rush of 2021. When and how the shooter was approved for entry will become clearer, and no doubt an orderly withdrawal would have allowed more careful investigation. This is one more cost of the Biden Administration’s Afghan failure.
But even careful vetting is imperfect, and Rahmanullah Lakanwal may have become radicalized in the U.S. This has been known to happen even with the children of refugees who grow up in America.
Some will say this means the U.S. should never admit such refugees, but the alternative is abandoning allies who assist Americans in war to the retribution of our enemies. The fate of Afghans, men and women, who worked with the U.S. has often been brutal. You can be sure Americans will fight overseas again, and our troops will need allies on the ground to succeed. How many will assist us if they believe there will be no exit for them if the U.S. leaves with the enemy triumphant?
The piece went on to note that Afghan refugees “are building new lives here in peace and are contributing to their communities” and “shouldn’t be blamed for the violent act of one man.”
No, the tens of thousands of Afghans “shouldn’t be blamed,” but 300 million-plus Americans shouldn’t be forced to accept random acts of terrorism because of one administration’s decision to throw refugee vetting out the window at the same time they threw Afghanistan under the Taliban bus, either.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial may be of a milder strain than USA Today’s mephitic piece, but it still remains a subtler symptom of a thoroughly gamed left-liberal media ecosystem where narrative trumps nuance.
Outlets like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, in their rush to shield sacred cows, ignore inconvenient facts like the 2022 Pentagon inspector general’s report that flagged dozens of untracked evacuees as security risks — a report echoing warnings that conservatives had voiced less than a year earlier, when they were told that they were racists and xenophobes for believing common sense should play a role in post-war Afghan migration.
Bad mouth-breathing right-wingers! Bad! Down! Believe what we tell you. And when we’re wrong, we’ll tell you what to believe then, too, and how Trump is still the one with sanguinary hands.
For the families of Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe — one dead, another fighting for life — and for every service member on the line, the real imperative is learning from this loss: Vetting isn’t optional. It’s the bare minimum we owe our own. Even if Lakanwal managed to pass vetting, that doesn’t make it any less imperative. For if he passed, what does that say about the multitudes that wouldn’t have?
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