When Donald Trump launched his first regime in 2017, I warned  he would “get a lot of people killed.”

Since nobody seems to be keeping track, I’ll cite The Lancet, a top medical journal, which concluded in 2021 Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of Covid.” The journal said that roughly 40 percent of the 470,000 deaths on his watch could’ve been avoided had he respected science.

In translation, Trump bears some responsibility for the deaths of 180,000.

But hey, remember what Stalin reputedly said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

Yes, stats can numb the mind. So let’s talk instead about the tragedy of one – as evidenced by what happened the other day in Washington, where a 20-year-old National Guard woman forfeited her flesh and blood for Trump. She did not die for a noble cause larger than herself; she died for the smallest of men, for a mentally deteriorating narcissist who’s using Guard troops as pawns for purposes of performative spectacle.

Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia should not have been in Washington, period. But she was, thanks to Trump, and now she’s dead. Her blood is on his hands.

Something like this – a bad actor walking up and firing bullets – was bound to happen. National Guard commanders feared so, in a memo back on Aug. 28. When it became clear Trump was bent on deploying troops to cities he hated, starting with Washington, even though National Guard members were not trained in law enforcement and crime prevention, the commanders warned their presence on the streets would be “a target of opportunity” in a “heightened threat environment,“ exposing them to “criminals, violent extremists, issue-motivated groups and lone actors to advance their interests.”

In other words, sitting ducks.

When the city of Washington sued the Trump regime, seeking to remove the troops, it cited the commanders’ memo. But when the Justice Department’s MAGA lawyers saw the memo, they dismissed it as merely “speculative.” Presumably they think otherwise now, unless they’ve been cult-trained to believe that picking up street trash and taking selfies with tourists are missions worth the shedding of blood.

Juliet Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says: “The National Guard is stranded somewhere on the battlefield of partisan politics. They’re not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.” But, of course, “we” never asked them at all. And now we’ve learned, thanks to a Nov. 21 federal court ruling, that Trump’s order was illegal. I know you’re shocked.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded Trump had stolen congressional powers and violated other stuff, but I’ll let Cobb tell it: “At its core, Congress has given the District rights to govern itself. Those rights are infringed upon when defendants (the ruling MAGATs) approve, in excess of their statutory authority, the deployment of National Guard troops to the District.”

In addition, the District “suffers a distinct injury from the presence of out-of-state National Guard units,” because “the Constitution placed the District exclusively under Congress’s authority to prevent individual states from exerting any influence over the nation’s capital.”

But ever since Nov. 21, Sarah Beckstrom and her fellow troopers – including Andrew Wolfe, who’s currently clinging to life – continued to be “targets of opportunity” because Cobb’s ruling has been in limbo thanks to Trump’s appeal. If he’d bowed to the ruling and ordered the troops out, Beckstrom would be alive and Wolfe would be healthy.

Which brings me to a Saturday editorial in The New York Times. This paragraph was astounding: “No one, including the president, is responsible for this tragedy, except for its perpetrator. It should be possible to understand both that Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard has been outrageous and that the use did not cause this shooting.”

I won’t cancel my subscription, but I have to ask: Is it really so hard to connect Dot A to Dot B and thus conclude that Beckstrom is dead as a consequence of what The Times itself called Trump’s “outrageous” use of the troops?

Predictably, Trump’s response to the shootings has been even more outrageous – ordering more troops into the District, thus creating even more “targets of opportunity.” This guy, currently saddled with a 36 percent approval rating, confirms something that Groucho Marx once said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

To me, it’s demonstrably obvious Beckstrom was sacrificed to the optics of MAGA theater, that she’s a tragic casualty of a fake war ginned up by a classic sociopath – someone who’s callous and narcissistic in the extreme, someone devoid of empathy. Am I being too harsh? Check out the exchange Trump had with a reporter the other day.

Q: “Do you plan to attend Sarah’s funeral?”

A: “I haven’t thought about it…I haven’t given it any thought…I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”

I rest my case.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]