Sarah Beckstrom Died for Trump’s Optics, a Casualty of His Vainglorious Foolery

When Donald Trump launched his first regime in 2017, I warned - cinch prediction - that he will “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 that Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of COVID.” The journal said that roughly 40% of the 470,000 deaths on his watch could’ve been avoided had he respected science; in translation, he 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 desiccating 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 that Trump was bent on deploying NG troops to cities that he hated, starting with Washington, even though NG troops were not trained in law enforcement and crime prevention, the commanders warned the rank and file that 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. The convicted criminal gave that order. And now we’ve learned, thanks to a Nov. 21 federal court ruling, that his order was illegal. I know you’re shocked.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded that 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 the Saturday, Nov. 29, editorial in The New York Times. This paragraph was astounding (italics are mine): “There will be Americans who note that this tragedy could have been averted if Ms. Beckstrom and Mr. Wolfe had not been needlessly deployed to Washington in August on the order of President Trump. 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.”

Huh?

I won’t cancel my subscription, but I gotta 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 calls Trump’s “outrageous” use of the troops?

And, 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 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 that 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.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist, alumni of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.substack.com and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email dickpolman7@gmail.com.