I Refused to Say Candyman in the Mirror, but Still He Has Been Summoned by Trump’s Evil Incompetence
- john raymond
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
I did not want to write the obvious sentence when President Trump ordered thousands of National Guard troops into Washington, D.C., as a standing domestic show of force.
Saying it felt like saying “Candyman” into the mirror: spell out the clearest terrorist target set in the country and you risk imagining it into being.
So I held back from the line that was sitting there from day one: if you turn downtown D.C. into a militarized stage, you turn the people in uniform into the most obvious targets for anyone who wants to strike at the United States itself.
On November 26, two newly sworn-in members of the West Virginia National Guard, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, were shot in what officials are calling a targeted ambush near Farragut Square, a few blocks from the White House.
The suspect, 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, came to the United States in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome and was granted asylum earlier this year; he allegedly used a .357 revolver and was wounded and captured by another Guardsman at the scene.
The FBI is treating the case as terrorism, and the CIA has now confirmed that Lakanwal previously worked with a CIA-backed Afghan unit in Kandahar.
In response, Trump called the shooting an “act of terror,” blamed Biden’s Afghan resettlement for letting the suspect into the country, ordered another 500 Guard troops into Washington on top of more than 2,200 already deployed, and triggered a blanket halt to Afghan immigration processing.
The military logic behind the risk does not require mystical thinking…
“Forward deployed” is not a map coordinate; it is a condition. The moment you put soldiers in uniform, outside the wire of secure facilities, in small groups, on predictable routes in public space, they become targetable.
That is as true in Kyiv or Baghdad as it is in downtown Washington. Modern war in Ukraine has underlined the principle in blood: visibility plus identifiability equals vulnerability, and the fact that the GPS location says “Farragut West” instead of “front line” does not change that equation.
The American folk distinction between “real military” and the National Guard is irrelevant to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of U.S. force. From the outside, there are only three symbols that matter: the uniform, the flag, and the gun.
Whether the person wearing them is active-duty Army or West Virginia Guard is a bureaucratic nuance. For someone whose life was shaped by the U.S. presence in Kandahar, a U.S. soldier on patrol two blocks from the White House is the same symbol he saw at a checkpoint in Afghanistan, only now positioned at the heart of American political power.
When Trump chooses to put that symbol on the street as a permanent backdrop for his “law-and-order” narrative, he is not assigning security guards; he is presenting military targets in the most symbolically intense square mile in the country.
The asymmetry of political accountability here is obvious…
If Biden had ordered this occupation of D.C., over legal objections, and two Guardsmen were then ambushed by a foreign-born attacker, the right would not be shrugging and saying, “Well, that’s terrorism.”
They would be running the familiar playbook: failure of force protection, failure of vetting, failure of judgment in putting troops there at all. What Trump and his apparatus are doing instead is weaponizing the word “terrorism” as an absolution.
By calling it an “act of terror” perpetrated by a Biden-vetted Afghan, they are trying to erase the enabling policy choice: to turn the capital into a forward operating environment for domestic political theater. Terrorism is the method. The decision to create that posture is the cause.
At the same time, Trump has been systematically dismantling the very machinery meant to prevent and mitigate attacks. Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed about 20–30% of staff at DHS’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) — the office designed to build national capacity for targeted-violence and terrorism prevention — hitting probationary staff and prompting the director’s departure.
A bipartisan group of senators has documented that FBI agents and analysts were transferred out of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section in March, and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents have been reassigned from terror cases to Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Meanwhile, DHS and its partners have pulled funding for the only comprehensive national database tracking domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and school shootings, and have cancelled or frozen grants for violence-prevention programs that had been training thousands of officers and mapping emerging threats.
In other words, Trump is not merely standing troops in the open; he is also blinding and starving the systems that would have the best chance of flagging or disrupting threats before they reach a bus stop near the White House.
CP3 loses staff. National-level data on terrorism and targeted violence is shut down just as incidents are rising. Prevention grants are frozen, with one recipient bluntly describing it as the government “getting out of the terrorism business.”
On top of that, nearly a quarter of FBI agents — up to 40% in some major offices — have been retasked to immigration enforcement rather than terrorism, cyber, or counterintelligence work. This is not bad luck; it is a deliberate reallocation of attention away from counterterrorism and toward Trump’s domestic political priorities.
The information environment is being degraded in parallel…
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/X led to roughly half the company’s staff being laid off, including significant cuts in trust-and-safety and moderation teams; Twitter itself confirmed that about 15% of the trust-and-safety group was cut in the early waves.
Media watchdogs and civil-society groups now warn that across X, Meta, and YouTube, rollbacks and layoffs have produced a “toxic environment” in which extremist content spreads more freely precisely as politics radicalizes.
Combine that with Trump’s daily dehumanizing rhetoric about “invaders” and “animals,” and you have an online ecosystem where potential lone-actor attackers marinate in grievance with fewer institutional brakes.
Again, this does not make Trump personally pick the target, but it does mean he is prying off the safety features and then acting astonished when the machine behaves as designed.
Viewed through Pillar One of the Raymond Method — regime security as prime directive — this pattern stops looking accidental…
The permanent Guard deployment in D.C. serves Trump’s regime security: it projects dominance over a Democratic city, furnishes constant militarized imagery for his base, and provides a ready pretext for crackdowns whenever anything goes wrong.
The purges at DHS, FBI, and in the data and grants ecosystem sever independent channels of expertise that could constrain him or expose his alignment with hostile interests. The social-media backslide amplifies the anger and fear on which his coalition feeds.
Under this logic, troops in the street are not primarily there for public safety; they are there as flexible inputs in a political survival strategy. If nothing happens, they are props. If something happens, they are martyrs leveraged to justify more forces, more fear, more scapegoating.
At that point, the distinction between “evil” and “incompetence” stops mattering…
Trump has been told that the D.C. deployment is likely unlawful and dangerous; he expanded it anyway. He has been told that cutting prevention offices, databases, and grants will blind us to rising threats; he cut them anyway.
He has been told that reassigning thousands of agents from terrorism and cyber to immigration will leave genuine national-security work undone; he did it anyway.
When predictable harm follows, and his first move is to exploit it for more power rather than reassess the underlying decisions, we are no longer dealing with benign error. We are dealing with a fusion of malice, ego, and negligence that reliably produces blood in the streets and then uses that blood as political accelerant.
So no, I did not want to write the sentence that an attack on these troops was nearly inevitable…
I refused to say Candyman in the mirror. But Trump has been chanting into that mirror for months now: militarize domestic politics, hollow out counterterror institutions, gut the data, fire the specialists, weaken moderation, inflame grievance, and then park soldiers in the open as billboards of American power.
The alleged terrorist owns his own guilt; that is not in dispute. But the commander-in-chief who chose the posture and dismantled the guardrails does not get to wash his hands because the FBI wrote “terrorism” on the file.
Terrorism is how the bill came due. Trump’s evil incompetence is why there was a bill to collect in the first place.