What did Donald Trump do today?

He whipsawed between excitement at a politically exploitable tragedy and fury that people noticed what he was doing. 

At a brief mid-vacation press availability today, Trump had an exchange with a reporter regarding the fatal shooting of two West Virginia National Guard troops in Washington. One of them, Sarah Beckstrom, died today. The suspected shooter is an Afghan national who had worked with American forces during the war and been vetted by Trump's own DHS and FBI and granted asylum during his second term.

Sarah Beckstrom, WV National Guard

 

The reporter asked why, given all that, Trump was trying to shift blame to the Biden administration. Trump started by calling her stupid three times, and then became increasingly agitated, repeating himself and stumbling over words while veering off topic into unrelated tangents related to the war in Afghanistan. One of these was his belief that controlling Bagram Air Force Base—which he himself explicitly surrendered to the extremist Taliban leadership of that country, along with everything else—would somehow give him power over China's nuclear weapons program. 

NANCY CORDES, CBS: A question about this tragic shooting in Washington DC. US 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 — he went cuckoo? He went nuts. And that happens, too, it happens too often with these people, you see them. Look. This is how they come in, this is how the, they're standing on top of each other in a — that's an airplane. There is no vetting or anything, they came in unvetted. And we have a lot of others in this country, we're gonna get them out, but they go cuckoo, something happens to them.

CORDES: Actually,  your DOJ IG just reported this year that there was thorough vetting by DHS and by the FBI of these Afghans who were brought into the US, so why do you blame the Biden administration—

TRUMP: Because they let 'em in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came into — 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 'em out. You can't get 'em out once they come in. And they came in , and they were unvetted, unchecked, there were many of 'em, and they came in on big planes, and it was disgraceful. And if you look, you'll see there as a law passed, makes it almost impossible not to let 'em in, not to — certify them, so to speak, uh, once they come in. And they came  in, and they shouldn'ta come in, and frankly the whole thing was a mess, the whole — Afghanistan situation was a mess, we should, it shoulda never taken place, if we're going to go out, and we woulda gone out, because I had everyone ready to go we woulda gone out with strength and dignity and precision, and we woulda left from Bagram [AFB], and we woulda kept Bagram by the way because of its very close relationship with China, where they make their missiles. But when you let the people come in by the thousands and thousands and thousands, uh, they made a terrible mistake.

The Trump administration rolled out a series of collective punishments for other Afghans living in the United States within hours after the shooting yesterday, and seems to have been waiting for an event like that to roll them out. 

Late this evening, Trump posted an explicitly racist screed to social media claiming that almost all immigrants—explicitly including the 25 million naturalized American citizens born elsewhere, a number that includes two of this three wives—were criminals or insane, and threatened to take away their citizenship (which he has no legal power to do). Trump appears to genuinely believe that "asylum-seekers" has something to do with mental health, in the sense of "insane asylum."

Immigrants of every kind—permanent residents, naturalized citizens, undocumented workers, refugees, and asylum-seekers—commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born American citizens.

Asked whether he'd attend the funeral of Sarah Beckstrom, the WV National Guard member who was killed in the attack, Trump responded noncommitally and immediately began bragging about the size of his 2024 election victory in that state.
 

Why does this matter?

• Collective punishment is Nazi shit. 

• Exploiting the tragic death of a 20-year-old woman he himself put in harm's way for political gain is low even for Trump.