The "Trump's Thanksgiving Triumph" Mini-Edition

Words fail to express my sorrow for the two West Virginia National Guard soldiers clinging to life—as of when I type this Wednesday night/Thursday morning—after the attack on them yesterday just blocks from the White House, a neighborhood I pass through routinely. Seeing American troops killed or grievously injured on dubious missions sadly isn’t new to me, but it doesn’t get better. I can feel my heart rate accelerating as I type this.

But what’s really raising my blood pressure is the certain knowledge that this is the near-perfect culmination of American Sultan Trump’s intentions and plans when he sent the National Guard into the District of Columbia in the first place. Trump wanted Guardsmen killed so that he’d have stronger justification for even stronger repressive measures, which is exactly what we’ll see. He also wants to see us retreat from our protest and resistance, out of “respect” or fear of escalation. I’m terrified he’ll get both. By the way, this is the first time in MSU history I’ve both bolded and italicized something, so please indulge me and read it a second time.

The truly perfect incident for him would have been an attack by an unattractive purple-haired transgendered white Mamdani-loving college graduate wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and a Che Guevara t-shirt whom he could characterize as “Antifa,” and who was killed and unable to testify at a future trial. He got his second-best choice, but it’s more than enough for him.

I can’t help but understand the motivations of a 29-year-old CIA paramilitary-trained Afghan who came to the U.S. in 2021 (which they’ll blame on Biden) and received asylum just this year (when they’ll ignore Trump is President). These were the guys who stayed to the bitter end to cover our evacuation flights, and often had to make their own ways out. His sense of betrayal at our treatment of his people is as understandable as his response is deplorable. But it should be obvious the people who will suffer most for his crime are his fellow Afghans in America and other immigrants, not other American soldiers. He’s perfectly justified ICE ramping up the brutality of their attacks on immigrants, because now they can point to his example as justification for their heightened “preemptive self-defense” aggression. The blood will flow. Stephen Miller is gleeful.

Already the Sultanate is calling for 500 more troops to be sent to DC—as if that will make DC safer! This is a textbook case of how authoritarians work: create the crisis, then respond to the crisis you created with more general repression. This attacker obviously only crossed a continent to attack soldiers because the soldiers were here. 500 more soldiers here is merely 500 more targets, not 500 people making the city safer from attacks that only happen due to their presence. Everyone in DC will be safer if the soldiers stay home, and the soldiers will be safer still.

This also comes just when the Sultanate is trying so hard to brand as the “Seditious Six” six war veterans who recorded a video reminding military personnel they are obliged to refuse to follow illegal orders. Recording a video saying “it’s illegal to do illegal things” is right up there with recording a video reading the Bill of Rights out loud on the list of “things that definitely are not sedition.”

On Tuesday, I was joking this was all an in-kind contribution to a Mark Kelly 2028 presidential campaign. Now, this attack has given the Sultanate the perfect moment to say that any criticism of military actions, even illegal ones, encourages violence against the military—even though it’s obvious an Afghan living in Washington state didn’t just decide to cross the continent to shoot some soldiers because six legislators stated a truism.

This attack also places non-violent resisters to the Sultanate in even greater danger. I have approached Guardsmen in DC several times: each time, I’ve spotted one sporting a “combat patch”—the patch of a unit worn on the right shoulder to signify the wearer served with that unit for at least 30 days in a combat zone (their normal “unit I’m assigned to” patch is on their left sleeve). I’ll approach that one, always a more senior sergeant—troops without combat patches are kids who wouldn’t relate to me, and who could get in real trouble with their leadership if they took my words too seriously, and I haven’t seen an officer on the street. I’ll ask about their deployment, talk about my own, and in a very friendly, casual manner say, “I’ve been there. Your being here now doesn’t feel like being on patrol with you, it feels like being occupied by you, even if you don’t mean it that way. My community isn’t safer with you here. The people who sent you here are hoping something bad happens to you, so that bad things will happen to us.”

Obviously no one has replied, “My God, you’re right!” and deserted for home that night (which I wouldn’t want, because I don’t want anyone getting court-martialed, at least not yet), but no one’s told me to go to hell either. All I was trying to do—and I’m a pretty persuasive guy if I say so myself—is seed a bit of doubt in the guys who’d be the ones giving orders to open fire if and when it comes to that. In the past few weeks, I’ve even been talking with other war veterans in DC about making this a bigger effort to reach more Guardsmen.

This attack makes this kind of civil engagement just that much harder. Now Guardsmen first have to decide whether we who are approaching them are a threat, which makes this more dangerous for us than it was a day ago. Then, they have to decide to listen to us and believe we’re not part of a group that wishes harm on them, or a diversion for an ambush, which is even worse considering the people who wish harm on them in fact are the people who sent them to DC in the first place!

The entire concept of “civil resistance”—and the reason it’s fundamentally incompatible with “armed resistance”—is that you are seeking to persuade the people who influence or control the means of violence that it’s better to support you than to support the rulers. This is very hard to do when they’re being attacked, which is why civil resistance experts refer to violence as a “contaminant” of a movement, an act of self-sabotage.

There are theoretical, hypothetical circumstances where violent resistance is the only feasible alternative, but the United States in November 2025 still is very far from that.

Just as with the murder of Charlie Kirk, the Sultan’s loyalists will say this attack means any protest against Sultan Donald is inherently disloyal, unpatriotic, and seditious. Worse, there are so-called “opponents” of Trump who will agree. They could not be more wrong. This attack heightens the need for continued non-violent resistance. The vital point is that the Guard’s very presence in DC is illegal, a court of law even said so just a few days ago, and if those Guardsmen never had been sent here, they’d be home with their families in West Virginia enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, and this Afghan attacker would be back on the Pacific coast a continent away doing—whatever he was doing. Sadly, that court gave the Administration a stay to appeal.

Meanwhile, as two young soldiers fight for life in a hospital mere blocks from the White House, the President who lawlessly ordered them to DC on his whim has flown to Mar-a-Lago. The King does not fret the sacrifice of a few pawns when they advance his plans.

My sign at the last No Kings protest read, “No Kings, No Redcoats.” My sadness at what’s happened to these soldiers does nothing to change the substance of my message. In the context of Ken Burns’s “The American Revolution” documentary, I feel like an American “provincial” veteran of the French and Indian War: those “Redcoats” were my friends and comrades-at-arms; I wish with all my heart they still could be, and they could. I’d love to buy one a beer tonight, or take some on a Smithsonian tour. But they’re following orders that make that impossible for me.

To accede to their presence and the demands of the rulers who sent them here is to surrender the very idea of our social contract that motivated me to serve alongside them in the first place. They can go home and still share our republic with me; I cannot. JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and other Great Replacement adherents share my exact view from the reverse perspective. I doubt those two soldiers in the hospital had much of an opinion either way.

I’m not giving up my sign for misguided fear it’s in “poor taste” to identify National Guardsmen from outside DC as “Redcoats” just because some of them got hurt in an illegal mission they shouldn’t have been on, in exactly the manner their “commander-in-chief” hoped for. That’s between them and their chain of command that deliberately planned for this, not me.

What happened this Wednesday in DC is a defeat for the effort to build a better American democracy peacefully. It should not affect the fundamental approach of our campaign, and it cannot affect our resolve. This Thanksgiving, be thankful for our commitment to democracy, and give a moment of thought for those soldiers and their families.