A Shot at Close Range - 20-year-old soldier Sarah Beckstrom has died and a president who uses the moment for himself

Only a few hundred meters from the White House, something happened on Wednesday afternoon that plunged Washington into a mix of shock, grief and political calculation. Two National Guard soldiers from West Virginia, recently deployed to the capital to support the government, were shot on the open street. On Thursday evening, Donald Trump announced during a Thanksgiving call with troops that one of the two wounded, twenty-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, had died. His sentence came without preparation, without visible restraint: "She just died. She is no longer with us. Her parents are with her."

Alongside her, her fellow soldier, 24-year-old Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, continues to fight for his life. Investigators describe the act as a targeted attack. The shooter - Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29 - was himself injured, but not critically. According to officials, he came to the United States in 2021 as part of Operation Allies Welcome, one of the Afghan partners evacuated after the fall of Kabul. He is said to have worked with the CIA in his home country.

Trump used these few known facts immediately as political ammunition. In his remarks, he called the attacker a "brutal traitor," spoke of a "terrorist attack" and turned a tragic message into an indictment against the Biden administration. The president, who has deployed tens of thousands of National Guard soldiers to support his mass deportation campaigns, portrayed the admission of Afghan local partners as a disastrous mistake - even before investigators had released a single indication of motive, background or context.

According to investigators, the shooter is 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan who came to the United States in 2021 through the resettlement program Operation Allies Welcome - a program created for people who had cooperated with U.S. agencies during the Afghanistan War. In his case, it was the CIA. Trump is now turning exactly that into political capital. He calls the man a "savage monster" and claims that the admission of Afghan partners "made this attack possible in the first place." What is known so far: Lakanwal was shot as well, but his injuries are not considered life-threatening. Whether the act was terrorist in nature or whether other factors played a role has not yet been confirmed by authorities.

Meanwhile, the crime scene itself remains a silent image of the violence. A planted concrete street planter with a single bullet hole. Barricades stretching across several blocks. Eyewitnesses describing how they heard the first shots and then saw a Guard soldier on the ground while first responders desperately tried to bring him back. The scene unfolded in broad daylight, on one of the busiest arteries of the government district, only two blocks from the White House.

The mayor of Washington says it was a targeted attack, but nothing further is publicly known. No explanation, no clear motive, no confirmation of whether the shooter knew the soldiers personally or saw them only as a symbol. Trump is already using this gap to construct a broader story about threat, internal enemies and state toughness. In the coming days, the death of the young soldier will undoubtedly become the center of a political debate. About security in the capital. About the strain on a National Guard that is already performing tasks that police, border authorities and the military were once meant to keep separate. About an immigration policy that has been instrumentalized by every administration for years. And about a president who rarely misses the chance to turn grief into a tool.

The investigation continues. The city mourns a young woman who was not even old enough to buy alcohol legally in many states. Her fellow soldier is fighting for his life in the hospital. And in the middle of all this stands a president at a microphone who already knows how he wants to tell the story - long before it is clear what really happened. One increasingly gets the impression that Trump treats the events more like a bingo win than a tragedy that many will never forget. What kind of person is this - and perhaps that will one day become the great question for history: How could all of this ever have been possible?