Trump is Using the D.C. Attack to Tighten Control
The Project 2025 Vision Is Coming to Life
Two National Guard troops were shot in Washington, D.C. Sarah Beckstrom, who is only 20 years old, has died from her injuries while the second National Guard member Andrew Wolfe, continues to fight for his life, Andrew is just 24-year-old. This is a tragedy, created by a lone shooter, according to the USA’s ruling regime, but that idea doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If this is a lone shooter event, then why is this being used by the U.S. government to enact elements of Trump’s plan that had previously been dismissed?
The capital city of the USA is now even more militarised than it was, despite the troop deployment already being deemed illegal. Trump’s desire for a military state is not the only Trump desire being fulfilled, as his long-held desire to ban certain foreigners from the USA is being persued.
We are in a bizarre area with this shooting, where the public are being told by the regime that this was a lone shooter, while the regime responds to the shooting as if it is a Reichstag fire moment. The shooter, a former CIA associate, has gifted the regime a moment predicted by Project 2025, and Trump cares more about capitalising on this, than he does about the individuals shot, having not “thought about” attending Sarah Beckstrom’s funeral.
Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste
Within hours of the shooting, Trump’s team moved to escalate the military presence in the capital. Five hundred additional Guard members ordered into D.C. A deployment that was already under legal challenge. A deployment a federal judge had ruled illegal just a week before the shooting took place. The regime have made no secret of their plan to militarise the streets of the USA, and this shooting came at a convenient time to offer psuedo justification for that to continue.
The administration used the attack to justify joint patrols of armed soldiers and city police across D.C. streets. A city that had not seen this level of military presence in modern times outside national emergencies. These patrols are not going to do much to catch the lone gunman without a time machine, however. The reality seems to be that the government is ready to use a moment of violence to justify a permanent shift in how the capital is policed, a shift they’ve already been trying to instigate for much of this year.
There is no evidence the shooting was part of a coordinated attack. And the attacker has more proven ties to U.S. intelligence than he has to any terror organisation. Yet the response is treating this moment as if the entire country had come under attack. When a government wants to expand its authority, a lone attacker becomes a tool.
This is how regimes behave when they decide a crisis is useful. They lift their plans off the shelf, they claim a need for urgency, but there is only opportunity. And they hope the public accepts the escalation before anyone has time to understand what changed.
All of the decisions made in the aftermath of this shooting have been shot down in times wihtout a crisis, and it is crucial that Americans understand that in order to see through it.
Crisis Is Their Catalyst
The regime is treating the shooting as proof of a collapsing nation, because that is the narrative served their goals. That is the narrative they have pushed since day one. However, anyone with a half-functioning memory knows that the decisions made in response were already in their hands.
Soldiers on city streets is not a normal response to one gunman, if it were, soldiers would populate every school in America.
The administration gains something else here; silence. It’s difficult to criticise a decision made to ‘protect’ after a national tragedy, especially if one is to criticise troops after troops have been shot. American troops are lauded in US society, seen as the protectors of the country, that is why this push to authoritarianism is framed as a way to protect them. Protect those who have long protected you, who could argue against something like that?
The entire response is designed to create an image. They want fear of violence to overshadow fear of authoritarianism.
To politicians who prioritise themselves over their citizens, a crisis is only useful if it is seized. Beside that, a government that wants to expand power does not wait. The Trump regime is doing exactly that. The shooting did not force their hand into enacting authoritarian moves. It freed their hand that held authoritarian cards they already had ready to play.
The Immigration Blitz
The administration has used this shooting to describe entire populations, enacting collective punsihment against Afghans, against asylum seekers, and against all visa holders from 19 nations. The suspect was Afghan, an asylum seeker and held a visa, so the guilt must be shared to each group, that is the logic at play right now. A sweeping political attack on immigrants, asylum seekers and anyone tied to the Global South. It was a policy they wanted long before the attack, even going back to the first Trump term.
Trump announced a permanent pause on migration from what he called Third World countries. The lumping billions of people into the blame game, turning nationality into threat status, and not for the first time. They’re impling that one man’s actions reveal something about whole continents, hoping that everyone is stupid enough to miss the fact that they tried this before, without the pretense of troops coming under fire.
Today, US immigration looks even more stark than it did yesterday. People from 19 nations have been told that their status will be revewed, and everyone in Afghanistan has been told that they are not welcome at this moment.
USCIS was ordered to re-examine every Green Card from countries labelled as “of concern.” Targeting lawful permanent residents who have lived, worked and paid taxes in the United States for years.
Asylum cases are being pulled into the same dragnet. The White House framed the shooting as proof that past decisions were too generous. This ignores the fact that there is still no evidence the shooter was part of any organised network.
Immigrant communities are already afraid in the USA, with ICE raids destroying trust accross the nation. People who followed every rule have now told the rules no longer matter and asylum seekers hear that their claims will be judged not by evidence, but on a predetermined status based on nationality.
The shooting gives them the cover they wanted to continue to6 reshape immigration in their own image.
Project 2025 in Motion
Everything the administration has done since the shooting aligns with the blueprint that was written long before any shots were fired. Project 2025 is a roadmap for transforming the state into an instrument of political loyalty, and immigration sits at the centre of that vision. What we are seeing now is the rollout.
The surge in deportation rhetoric mirrors the project’s call for the largest removal campaign in modern American history. The pause on migration from the Global South reflects its insistence on reducing legal immigration to levels the United States has never attempted. The retroactive review of Green Cards follows its plan to treat permanent residency as conditional rather than stable.
The use of the National Guard fits the same authoritarian pattern. Project 2025 argues for expanding executive authority in the face of unrest. It encourages a model of domestic governance where troop deployments are a normal response to civic tension. The capital becoming a semi-militarised zone is precisely the environment the project describes.
Asylum restrictions move the country closer to the goal of collapsing humanitarian pathways. The emphasis on “dangerous regions” echoes the project’s framing that certain populations should be screened out entirely. The shooting gave them the story they needed to accelerate those plans.
Every part of the post-shooting agenda lines up with the document’s core ambitions. Reduce immigration to the lowest levels in modern history, expand the enforcement reach of the federal government, position dissent, oversight and community resistance as security threats.
The crisis did not create this agenda, but it has made it louder. It gave the administration a moment to present their long-term project as an emergency response. Project 2025 is not theoretical anymore, it hasn’t been for a while. It is being implemented in real time, one decision at a time, each one framed as a reaction to an event that had nothing to do with the goals behind it.
What Trump’s Response Says About His Priorities
Trump’s reaction to the shooting tells you everything about how he sees the people involved. When asked if he would attend her funeral, he said he had not thought about it, then he shifted the conversation to brag about his election margin in her home state. Dismissing Sarah Beckstrom’s murder, because his regime was a more important topic.
There has been no serious discussion about the safety of the troops already deployed in the capital. The administration’s concern begins and ends with how the incident can be used politically, despite the troop deployment itself putting these soldiers in the path of a gunman.
Trump cares about the imagery, not the people. The shooting and death become justification for harsher policies, rather than a call to look at the deployment that put them in harms way. He does not treat them as individuals whose lives mattered, he treats them parts of a narrative he wanted to push long before this shooting.
The Long-Term Danger
The decisions made after the shooting are not temporary reactions. They are structural changes. They shift the country toward a new normal where military presence in the capital is accepted, where immigration is restricted by political mood rather than law, and where executive power expands whenever fear can be manufactured or repurposed.
Troops in Washington are not a stabilising force, not an emergency measure, but they certainly want you to believe they are. Once a government normalises soldiers on city streets, it rarely walks it back.
The immigration decisions create another layer, again, probably one of permanence. Pausing migration from the Global South is not a switch that will be flipped off by this regime. Freezing Afghan immigration punishes people who risked everything for the United States. Re-examining Green Cards introduces a new uncertainty into the lives of lawful residents who have done nothing wrong, and already are forced to live in fear of Trump’s ICE raids. These measures reshape the landscape and divide communities into the favoured and the suspect.
Asylum restrictions push the already shrinking system closer to collapse. People who fled danger now face the possibility that their claims will be judged not on merit but on what the administration needs politically. The government can now decide that entire nationalities represent a threat and act accordingly.
The danger lies in the precedent. If one shooting can activate this level of political redesign, then any future incident can do the same, and likely will. The government has shown that it will reach for the harshest tools available whenever the opportunity presents itself. These crisis events are only likely to become more frequent, as polarisation has become the rule of the land.
A shift in power does not happen all at once. It happens through decisions like these. One expansion of authority, then another, then another. The country wakes up one day to find that emergency powers have become normal powers, and the laws that once protected people have been replaced by policies written in moments of fear. A democracy celebrated by a population, suddenly becomes a dictatorship feared by them.
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We’re Building the Wikipedia of ICE Activity, Crimes and Identities
When you start looking closely at immigration enforcement in the United States, you realise the problem isn’t just what ICE does, it’s that almost none of it is recorded anywhere that the public can actually find. There are thousands of small actions that happen quietly with no consistent paper trail, no central record, no way to trace who was involved …
Is it just my conspiri-senses tingling or does this administration’s need to preemptively bolster the federal troop presence stir memories of the scenes in that recent Civil War movie… where the last stand is the WH ?… it’s just so weird and ominous … what’s the MO besides power, control and dominance… they’re not that smart, it’s got to be a smoke screen over a smoke screen scenario. How much longer on the rebuild of the bunker ball room?