More Trickles Out About Rahmanullah Lakanwal

Robert Spencer asked over the weekend, "Hey, Why Was the DC National Guard Shooter Naked Except for a Pair of Socks?":

The first photograph that circulated of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot two National Guard members in Washington on Wednesday, murdering one of them, showed him lying on a gurney, naked except for a pair of socks. Initial reports took due notice of this odd fact, without making any attempt to explain it[.]

I'll get back to this. But via the New York Post:

A leading national refugee agency was warned multiple times that the Afghan terror suspect accused of murdering one National Guard member and critically injuring another was spiraling into mania and mental illness beginning in 2023, according to a bombshell email leak.

Despite this, and an alleged failure to maintain his mandated contact with state social services, he still managed to win asylum in April of this year.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal‘s behavior was so disturbing that a local community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, according to emails to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) seen by the Associated Press.

In other words, he was a "known wolf". This pattern, though, extends beyond terrorism, as we'll see. The link continues,

He was brought to the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, moving to Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and their five young sons.

But he reportedly struggled to assimilate, failed to hold down a steady job or commit to learning English, according to the emails.

Alternating between “periods of dark isolation and reckless travel,” Lakanwal sometimes spent weeks in his “darkened room, not speaking to anyone, not even his wife or older kids,” the person wrote.

Lakanwal also failed to stay in contact with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) as was mandated by the terms of his entry into the US, except for “interim” weeks where he would “do the right things,” according to the emails.

But his killing of National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom in Washington on Thanksgiving isn't that far from what we've seen in two other recent, highly publicized attacks, Lawrence Reed's burning of Bethany MaGee in an attack on the Chicago L on November 17, and Decarlos Dejuan Brown's attack on Iryna Zarutska in a Charlotte, NC tram car on August 22. All three were predictable, given the backgrounds of the subjects. Of Reed,

[W]hile in police custody, Reed "made repeated spontaneous and unprompted utterances, specifically yelling 'burn bitch' and 'burn alive bitch'". Reed was charged federally with terrorism against a mass transportation system. The charge is punishable by a maximum sentence of life in federal prison and if the victim dies, Reed could be eligible for the death penalty.

Reed has been arrested by Chicago police at least 72 times over the past 30 years, including 15 criminal convictions, and has a history of mental illness. As described by the Chicago Tribune, Reed "was arrested while on pretrial release for an aggravated battery case and has several prior cases in his criminal history, including a 2020 conviction for aggravated arson for an attempt to set the Thompson Center on fire."

Decarlos Dejuan Brown

had been arrested 14 times in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, before the stabbing, with criminal charges dating back to 2007. On April 11, 2014, he was convicted of breaking and entering. While on probation, he was arrested for armed robbery and possession of a firearm by a felon. Brown was convicted of armed robbery and incarcerated in state prison from 2015 to September 2020. Upon release, he initially lived with his family, but his mother told ABC News that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at this point and displayed violent behavior at home. His mother said that she had sought involuntary commitment, but that it was denied. The Associated Press reported that involuntary commitments are difficult to obtain unless a court finds the person to be dangerous.

The fact that one subject is a migrant, while the other two are from the traditional street criminal class, deflects attention from an argument I've been making that Marx's Lumpenproletariat has expanded to include migrants. All three of these subjects hail from the new Lumpenproletariat, and they also share a feature of the new class alliance: there's a continuing public policy objective whereby the upper echelons privilege the Lumpenproletariat, especially by creating circumstasnces under which warning signs that individuals are dangerous are ignored, "accidentally on purpose".

In this respect, the current violent attacks on ICE and the National Guard are extensions of the class warfare that was manifest in the 2020 George Floyd riots. What was significant then was the move by the elites to glamorize, even canonize, a run-of-the-mill street criminal while calling to defund the police. The Ivy League Republican John Hinderaker is obtuse enough not fully to recognize how this fits in here, but he comes close:

More broadly, we can see that the Democrats’ war on law enforcement is succeeding. It has been focused [this year] mostly against America’s immigration laws, which Democrats hate but don’t have the votes to repeal. Democrats have viciously attacked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, denouncing its agents as a modern-day “Gestapo,” and trying at every turn to interfere with their work. . . . But the real threat lies underneath–the threat that people who are deranged and/or unusually loyal to the Democratic Party will be emboldened to try to kill ICE agents.

No, the point he's missing is they -- that is, members of the new Lumpenproletariat, enabled by conditions created by the elites, which include feckless mental health institutions -- encourage the deranged to attack attractive members of the new working class. That's the practical result of the current class war, the very rich and the very bottom arranged against the middle.

But let's go back to Robert Spencer's attempts to explain Lakanwal's nakedness:

Why had he taken off his clothes after shooting people? The simplest and most obvious answer is the same reason for why Mohamed Atta intended to change into a fancy suit: to meet the virgins. Atta wanted to look sharp; Al Issa wanted to get right down to business.

So also, apparently, did Rahmanullah Lakanwal. Yet neither the establishment media nor law enforcement authorities have made any mention of this. After all, it would only highlight Lakanwal’s identity as an Islamic jihadi, when every public official and mainstream journalist knows that the Islamic character of jihad violence must be denied or obscured at all costs. And so we have the curious phenomenon of the media reporting that this murderer was naked, yet never even attempting to explain why. All in a day’s work for today’s media propagandists.

I would go one step farther and suggest this is, at least metaphorically, a sexually directed attack on an attractive white woman of the working class, not much different from Lawrence Reed's "burn alive bitch" or Decarlos Brown's "I got that white girl". But much more important is that this is enabled and celebrated by the elites. According to Chrome AI mode,

Stochastic terrorism is a term used in social science and criminology for the process by which public, hostile rhetoric from an influential figure leads to random, unpredictable acts of violence by their followers that are statistically probable to occur. The individual acts are unpredictable, but the overall pattern of violence is a predictable consequence of the hateful communication.

But even these individual acts are simply not "unpredictable". The subjects who committed them had already been identified and should already have been in custody or deported. It is the continuing project of the elites to disable the institutions that are meant to prevent these episodes within the community at large.

The Nuremberg Scenario

I don't know if this is any sort of stunning insight, but ruminating on the latest "illegal orders" kerfuffle, it occurred to me yet again that Trump's whole political career can be understood as an extended Road Runner cartoon. In the 2016 election alone, a number of issues arose, including allegations of Russian collusion and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, that would resurface in repeated attempts to bring him down in two impeachments and several criminal cases, but to no effect.

The Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise that just about everyone was convinced would destroy his 2016 candidacy. Repeated attemnpts to tie him to the January 6 Capitol incursion have been just as ineffective. The Schumer Shutdown, ditto. Now it turns out that even before the shutdown, the idea of creating some sort of "illegal orders" scandal was a glimmer in certain eyes:

A left-wing group is putting up billboards in high-crime cities where President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard, telling military service members that is not what they “signed up for” and encouraging them to refuse “unlawful orders.”

Win Without War, a self-described “diverse network of activists and national organizations working for progressive foreign policy,” launched its billboard campaign in September in Washington, DC, before expanding to Chicago, Memphis, and the military bases Ft. Bragg and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Thus the Mark Kelly-Elissa Slotkin "subversive six" ad wasn't without context. But its effect was blunted when Slotkin herself acknowledged to Martha Raddatz, "To my knowledge, I -- I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela". Then last Wednesday's shootings of two National Guard troops in Washington distracted attention from the whole issue.

But don't lose hope! The Washington Post, which brought us Deep Throat half a century ago, is back on the case!

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has declared recent reporting that he may have illegally ordered all people to be killed in a military strike in the Caribbean as “fake news” on Friday evening, adding that the series of strikes of people on boats had been “lawful under both US and international law”.

. . . The remarks came after a Washington Post report this week alleged that Hegseth ordered defense officials to “kill everybody” traveling on a boat that was being surveilled by analysts on 2 September, the first strike of many carried out in recent months by the Trump administration. The White House said – without proof – that the people in the boats in the Caribbean, killed in Pentagon operations, were drug smugglers.

I'm linking to The Guardian's account, because the Post is behind a paywall. But where's the smoking gun?

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Is that it? Apparently so. The rest of the story is just filler to bulk things out, such as:

Trump has said that the US is attacking the boats due to high rates of fentanyl-related overdose deaths. But lawmakers, narcotics experts and former law enforcement officials have rejected that claim, since fentanyl does not come from Venezuela.

So far, only The Guardian has run with this story. This could well be because everyone else is watching football over the four-day weekend, and it'll get legs on Monday. Deliberately shooting survivors, if this happened, would be a violation of international law and US military policy, but even The Guardian's account suggests this may not be what happened:

Throughout the course of the strikes, there have only been a few survivors, including an Ecuadorian man and a Colombian man, who were captured by the US then returned to their home countries.

One boat strike in October, off the Pacific coast of Mexico, led the Mexican navy to begin a search-and-rescue operation for survivors.

Among the few reactions has been, predicatably, from David French:

If true, this is heinous and illegal. You do not kill helpless survivors of a sinking boat. (It enraged us when, for example, the Japanese would machine-gun American survivors in the water.)
You do not kill someone who is hors de combat, and no quarter orders are flatly illegal. https://t.co/lhaL89s650

— David French (@DavidAFrench) November 28, 2025

The Nuremberg scenario has been the ultimate leftist fantasy at least since the 1966 Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, although this itself was just a manifestation of earlier fantasies. As described inb the link,

The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, Russell–Sartre Tribunal, or Stockholm Tribunal, was a private people's tribunal organised in 1966 by Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, and hosted by French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Lelio Basso, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, Ralph Schoenman, Isaac Deutscher, Günther Anders, Lázaro Cárdenas and several others. The tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam.

. . . The tribunal was constituted in November 1966, and was conducted in two sessions in 1967, in Stockholm, Sweden and Roskilde, Denmark. Bertrand Russell's book on the armed confrontations underway in Vietnam, War Crimes in Vietnam, was published in January 1967. His postscript called for establishing this investigative body. The findings of the tribunal were largely ignored in the United States.

So far, the idea of bringing about a Nuremberg scenario strikes me as about as effective as any of the other schemes Wile E. Coyote cooks up from the Acme catalog.

It's Trump's Fault!

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C.:

The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.

Let's parse this out. The argument is that the National Guard troops in Washington have been deployed "performatively", which implies that this is somehow unrelated to their actual function, which is otherwise unspecified (Hurricane relief? Border control? Overseas opeerations?) I did a web search on "performative" and got several definitions that I think reflect what the writer means by using the word in this context:

• done or expressed insincerely or inauthentically, typically with the intention of impressing others or improving one's own image
• a pejorative for people that publicly act out in a way to show their goodness and virtue but do not actually do the real work
• done or expressed for the sake of appearance, esp. to impress others or to improve one's own image.

The writer stresses this by asserting the troops' "days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform". That two members should be shot by an aggrieved illegal is just the natural consequence of such a feckless deployment.

But in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination, there were riots in Washington:

As the violence and property destruction continued, President Lyndon B. Johnson called in U.S. troops to quell the disturbance and District of Columbia Mayor Walter E. Washington declared a 5:30 p.m. curfew. About 6,000 troops were mobilized in the District by dusk on April 5, including units from the Army and the Marine Corps as well as the D.C. National Guard.

. . . More than 13,000 soldiers patrolled Washington, DC, during this tumultuous period—the first time federal troops were sent into the capital since the Army dispersed the Bonus Marchers in 1932. The Marines remained stationed at the Capitol until April 12, eventually using barracks on Capitol Hill to rest.

This was, in fact, a "performative deployment". Thousands of National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots. As in every such case, they were untrained in law enforcement. Their job wasn't to collar criminals; their job was simply to be the face of authority, to be present on the streets as a deterrent to disorder. All such deployments are "performative". The police are always the ones who actually collar criminals.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is it legitimate for military power to be deliberately performative?" It answered,

Yes, military power is considered to be deliberately performative to a significant extent. Actions, from training to actual operations, are often designed not just for their immediate physical effects, but also to signal strength, intent, and resolve to both domestic and international audiences.

Even in the gospels, there's reference to the performative value of the military (Luke 14:31-32):

Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?

And if not, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

But we come to the next question, the risk that troops on such a deployment are endangered. The fact is that there's a certain amount of unavoidable risk that comes just from being in the military. For instance,

Four Louisiana National Guardsmen from the 1st Assault Helicopter Battalion, 244th Aviation Regiment who died in a training accident, March 10, have been identified.

. . . The Louisiana Army National Guard was participating in a routine night-time training exercise with the Marine 2nd Special Operations Battalion. The Black Hawk carrying the four aircrew and seven Marines crashed into the Santa Rosa Sound in Navarre, Florida, March 10.

The two National Guard members were shot while in the line of duty during their deployment to Washington, D.C., while on what were said to be "high visibility patrols" near the Farragut West metro station; i.e., under legal orders to conduct legitimate performative operations. But the Atlantic writer concludes,

We are not at war now. But Trump’s use of the National Guard suggests that he thinks we are not at peace either. The National Guard is stranded somewhere on this battlefield of partisan politics. They are not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.

What's war got to do with it? The National Guard is routinely deployed for disaster relief, riot control, and many other functions outside wartime. Deployments are both inconvenient and risky, but members have signed up for them, and they're paid to be available. But aLso, the National Guard, especially within Washington, can be and has been deployed for purposes that have been hard to distinguish from politics, such as dispersing the 1932 Bonus Army encampment or contributing to the air of crisis that sorrounded the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act during that year's Martin Luther King riots.

There can be no question that Trump's deployment of the National Guard, especially to Washington, DC, was within the scope of his authority. In addition, he was elected to office in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the extent and nature of two related issues, illegal migration and urban crime. Are we "not at peace" over these issues? The National Guard members were apparently targeted by an aggrieved illegal migrant acting as a partisan combatant in something that's hard not to characterize as this same quasi-war, while on an anti-crime deployment. If anything, it's sharpened the the impression we have of the nature of this conflict.

The Pipe Bomber? Never Mind!

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago, I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5.

The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result.

But beyond that, this story has been strange from the start. Blaze Media is Glenn Beck's outfit. Beck, a converted Mormon, has always been just a dollar-store Rush Limbaugh, and Blaze Media has never been known for breaking big new stories. New investigative stories typically come from reporters like Catherine Herridge, John Solomon, or Susan Crabtree. The Blaze Media story comes from Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman, who simply don't have that record.

The second problem is that Baker and Hanneman claim they identified Ms C via "gait analysis", but this doesn't hold water. It implies that some sort of massive AI program reviewed millions of videos of ordinary people walking, compared them to the video on the FBI site of the wandering figure, and lo and behold, it spat out the name of Ms C. I don't think so. I think someone from somewhere in the deep state contacted Baker and Hanneman, said you might want to look at Ms C, and at best, they took a "gait analysis" app and ran it against the FBI video vs one of Ms C walking, and they said doggone it, it's Ms C!

That is, if they did anything like that at all. There's so much hinky about this story that I don't feel compelled to accept any of this. A CBS story from this past Tuesday seems much closer to the circumstances I've surmised:

Multiple sources said that a unit overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drafted a memo identifying the woman and describing allegations that she had placed the explosive devices outside Democratic and Republican party offices. The memo was written after ODNI was made aware of allegations from an outside source, an ODNI spokesperson said.

ODNI officials said the agency received a tip from a person affiliated with a media organization about potential criminal wrongdoing by an individual believed to be working at an intelligence agency and set about documenting it in a memo.

A copy of the unfinished memo was given to senior staff at the security officer's workplace, sources said.

. . . A short time after the unfinished memo began to circulate, the conservative news outlet, Blaze News, published details similar to those in the draft, including the woman's full name.

But the same CBS News story says that after her employer followed up with Ms C, she

cleared her name by providing an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed, sources told CBS News. The FBI has now ruled her out as a suspect in the 2021 plot, according to three sources — but only after her name circulated on social platforms and a conservative news site.

This seems a little too cut and dried as well. I tend to think there's too much of an effort to wrap up any inconvenient questions and proclaim there's nothing more to see. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, while more of a conspiracy theorist than I am, makes a convincing case for some sort of deep state agenda here:

However, the CBS narrative doesn’t focus on The Blaze or the reporting of Steve Baker, instead the media hit shifts responsibility to Tulsi Gabbard who is operating outside her intelligence oversight lane and conducting independent investigations which includes information from “outside sources.”

. . . Having followed the operations of these embed “intel officials” the motive for this operation against the office of the DNI is clear. You, me, all of us can see with clear non-pretending eyes, the intent of this op was to change the way Tulsi Gabbard is receiving information and to block the delivery of external sunlight.

There’s no better way for the “Seven Ways from Sunday” domestic group to operate than to seed false information (“whistleblower”) to their target (ODNI). Then work to externalize it (Steve Baker), emphasize it (Glenn Beck), build drama toward it, so that eventually it can then be cited as an example to ensure no further assistance is ever accepted. Isolate – Ridicule – Marginalize.

. . . Notice the script, the emphasis, the narrative as it is performed. All of it is entirely transparent.

But other pieces of the story as they've trickled out still strike me as strangely incongruous and oddly coincidental. Take the Washington Metro fare card that was somehow traced to the pipe bombing -- as I discussed here two weeks ago, the version we're given is that the FBI, maybe the same people who found the wandering figure in the hoodie and mask, or maybe not, combed the video from the prior day and identified someone else, someone completely different, who was wandering around the same area and taking photos of things with numbers on them, dumpsters and such.

This turns out to have been a childhood friend of Ms C's then-next-door neighbor, who'd dropped in from out of town, a real MAGA type whom the neighbor didn't trust, but whom he nevertheless lent his extra Metro card, the one he didn't use, to go down to Capitol Hill and wander around and take pictures of things with numbers on them for a book he was writing. Or something like that. Hey, doesn't everyone keep a second Metro card that they never use?

And this was all thoroughly investigated and ruled out as not suspicious. Or something like that. And the guy's then-next door neighbor, just out of the blue, was fingered five years later as maybe the person who was wandering around, completely independently of another guy who was tracked on video taking pictures of things with numbers on them, dropping backpacks with bombs under benches. All of this is completely random and coincidental, nothiong to see here. We're still searching for the suspect.

Except that while I don't normally wander around taking pictures of things like dumpsters with numbers on them, I do watch a lot of true crime shows on TV. One of the most common things you hear is seasoned detectives saying that in their line of work, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Except that when you're investigating two pipe bombs that coincidentally didn't explode on January 6, there are coincidences up the wazoo, but this is perfectly fine.

Another thing I hear pretty frequently is cold case detectives saying when you've got a cold case that ought to be solvable, but it doesn't quite seem to fall into place, you've simply got to go back to the beginning and look at everything one more time. It's hard to think this hasn't yet been done here.

They need to start with Ms C's videotape of her playing with her puppies, but that's just one of a great many things that don't quite fit.

Nervous Nellies

A headline in the normally pro-Trump New York Post: Michael Goodwin: Trump needs to hit the reset button if the GOP wants to win the 2026 midterms:

As he barrels toward the end of his first year back in the White House, the president is beset by slumping poll numbers and a pileup of problems, some of which are self-inflicted.

This is my first big puzzle, the "slumping poll numbers". These are the same polls that were wildly off just a few weeks ago, claiming the New Jersey governor's race was a tossup, and Republicans even had a chance in Virginia. But the outcome was dog bites man; blue states voted blue. Nobody's asking what happened to put expectations so far out of whack. But let's proceed:

Even a gaggle of normally obedient Republicans in Congress are growing restless, and his call for gerrymandering House district lines in red states to pad the GOP advantage in the midterms is in danger of producing the opposite outcome.

This comes after Trump's victory in the Schumer Shutdown on November 10, only a little over two weeks ago, in which Mark Halperin marveled over the Republicans' message discipline throughoput the 41-day standoff. This was not your grandfather's Republican Party. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was there dissent among Republicans in the 2018 government shutdown?" It answered with specific examples, including:

Opposition to the Funding Bill: In the House, during a December 2018 vote on a spending bill that included $5 billion for the border wall, eight Republicans joined Democrats to vote against it. Some of these dissenting members were concerned about the potential for a shutdown or the general increase in spending.

Concerns over Executive Power: Later, in a separate vote in the Senate in September 2019 related to the use of military funds for the wall (following Trump's national emergency declaration to bypass Congress), eleven Republicans voted to block the president's move, expressing concern over the precedent it set for presidential power. This included Senators like Mitt Romney, Mike Lee, and Susan Collins.

Criticism of Strategy: Some rank-and-file Republican lawmakers were publicly critical of their own party's handling of the situation and the decision to force a shutdown, which became the longest in U.S. history. Some in the conservative Freedom Caucus also had internal disagreements about the timing and tactics of the shutdown fight.

"Normally obedient Republicans"? Since when? Here's another story from just this past Monday:

A senior House Republican reportedly warned that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) shocking resignation is just the beginning, and predicted that what happens next could cost the GOP the majority even before next year’s midterm elections.

“More explosive early resignations are coming,” the unnamed figure told Punchbowl News on Monday. “It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

But other stories don't nesessarily draw the same picture:

Speaker Mike Johnson has told the White House that most House Republicans have little interest in extending the Affordable Care Act's enhanced subsidies, sources familiar with the conversation told CBS News.

Johnson delivered the message in a phone call with senior administration officials as President Trump's advisers were drafting a plan to continue the subsidies for an additional two years. That plan that was initially expected to emerge this week.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Johnson's warning to the White House regarding the lack of GOP House support for the plan. Any White House health care plan would require overwhelming Republican support in the House to be enacted.

It sounds as though there's some sort of productive discussion under way, with some type of consensus emerging that will hold the line against increased spending. On balabnce, this has been a winning issue for Republicans whenever they've been consistent on it. But Goodwin contiinues,

According to Real Clear Politics, his average approval is a mere 43%, while his average disapproval is 54.8%, a spread of minus 11.8 points.

Most troubling, the numbers are far worse on his handling of the economy, which was the issue at the heart of his resounding 2024 victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in all the swing states.

Yet now Trump’s average approval on the economy is a mere 39.5%, against an average disapproval of 57.8%, creating a huge spread of minus 18.3.

Again, Real Clear Politics has yet to explain how its averages were so far off the actual results in the latest elections. Almost all the polls that make up its composites were wildly outside the margin of error, which I discussed in this post. But Goodwin advises,

The big picture suggests he needs a reset, and maybe a rest.

In any event, it’s time to tighten the focus and follow a more methodical approach so the most important things get sufficient presidential attention.

What puzzles me is that just in the past few weeks, Trump has scored a major victory in ending the Schumer Shutdown and securing the resignation of a high-profile "normally obedient Republican". The main focus of the anti-Trump resistance has been to resurrect the question of whether Trump is some sort of subversive, this time giving the military illegal orders. Hysterical allegations -- that he's a Russian asset, that he's a rapist, that he's a pedo, that he's trying to get revenge on his enemies, that he's giving the military illegal orders -- have historically failed to gain traction.

I keep saying it's a major miscalculation to underestimate the guy.

The Case Of Sen Kelly

BREAKING: The Department of War is reportedly considering recalling Sen. Mark Kelly (D) to active duty for possible court-martial after he urged U.S. troops to defy orders from Trump and Hegseth. pic.twitter.com/W8q2a3iMlL

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 24, 2025

The received opinion, via the Sacramento Bee, goes like this:

Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty. This seems obvious, but on Thursday, Nov. 20, President Donald Trump responded to a video by six members of Congress by posting: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

What did the members of Congress do to deserve this threat of capital punishment? They posted a 90-second video on social media that spoke to members of the military and intelligence communities about their oath to the Constitution. The part of the video that drew Trump’s ire was this remark: “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. ... Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. ... No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

So what is Trump doing here? As I've been saying, it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that he's impulse-driven, unless we attribute considerable discernment to his impulses, which in recent weeks have given him clear victories over the Schumer Shutdown and Rep Taylor Greene. Let's refer once more to the business-school analysis of his negotiating style that I've used in a number of posts here:

My argument is that Trump’s coercive negotiation style is best understood through the prism of his four public roles: observer, performer, controller, and disrupter.

. . . [U]sing observation to facilitate a mutual gains approach is not what Donald Trump has in mind when he prepares for a negotiation. Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent”. . . . He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities.

As much as Trump watches others, he is aware of being watched: “life is a performance art,” he wrote [in] Think Like a Champion.

. . . Trump’s fighting style has received considerable attention: “That’s just my makeup,” he explained in The Art of the Deal. “I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky”. “I love fighting … battles,” Trump said recently.

. . . Trump the disrupter is instinct‐driven. “Listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper”. He repeated this advice ten years later. “The chosen few,” he wrote, “can just go with their gut”. Trump the disrupter is also action‐oriented: “If you’re going to achieve anything, you have to take action”.

The congresspeople who posted the video urging military members not to follow "illegal" orders was tailor-made for Trump's strategy. He immediately jumped on it in his roles as performer and disrupter:

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET,” the president wrote in one Truth Social post Thursday morning (Nov 20), linking to an article about the video from the Washington Examiner.

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” Trump wrote in another post.

In a third, he wrote: "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"

But it's worth pointing out that Trump as observer had already been at work. The Democrat who had the most to lose in making the video was Sen Mark Kelly:

Because Kelly was a senior officer who retired from the Navy, he is required to remain available for recall to the military by law. The other five lawmakers, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan, are not eligible for recall to a military service.

The recall can also be for the purpose of court martial for violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to which Kelly continues to be subject as a retiree. Kelly issued a bombastic reply:

When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired – which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

Sec Hegseth replied,

So “Captain” Kelly, not only did your sedition video intentionally undercut good order & discipline…but you can’t even display your uniform correctly.

Your medals are out of order & rows reversed. When/if you are recalled to active duty, it’ll start with a uniform inspection. https://t.co/rsSyrPcmbg

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) November 25, 2025

Intriguingly, legacy media hasn't been giving the other Democrats an easy ride:

Slotkin faced questions during an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the recent reaction to a social media video she and five other Democratic lawmakers made encouraging service members to "refuse illegal orders."

"Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?" host Martha Raddatz asked.

"To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela," Slotkin responded.

Elsewhere,

NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday asked [Sen Amy] Klobuchar what specific “illegal acts” the seditious Democrats were referring to in the viral video.

“I wonder, do you know what the specific, illegal acts are that your democratic colleagues were referring to there?” Kristen Welker asked Klobuchar.

Klobuchar could not answer Welker.

. . . “If their commander were to tell them, hey go out on the streets… and do this and that, that’s not following the order that is in law,” Klobuchar said.

The allegations against Kelly are beginning to push other Democrats over the edge. Arizona Sen Ruben Gallego posted a video while driving:

This is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. Hey, this is Ruben Gallego, I’m traveling through Arizona right now, and I just see the news that Department of Defense is starting investigation against my seat mate, Mark Kelly. this is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. And, you know, these guys are trying to say that they’re not acting like fascists, they’re not trying to give as much power to this president as a king, that they should stop acting like it.

Trump as observer, performer, controller, and disrupter has deliberately provoked a donnybrook, the sort of thing that by his own admission he loves. And although he made his initial allegations with characteristic hyperbole and bravado, there's substance behind them, as former CIA operations officer Bryan Dean Wright pointed out to Jesse Waters:

[I]f you watch the video again, one of the first things that [Sen Slotkin] and the others do is they establish credibility and authority. They talk about who they are, working for the CIA and working for the military. They then move into the next phase of the propaganda message, which is, there’s a crisis. They create a crisis for the listeners inside the FBI and the CIA and the military, and they say that there is a threat, not just abroad, like we might face with China or Russia or al-Qaeda, but inside of the country. The threat is here. Who’s that threat? Donald Trump.

It looks like there might be serious grounds for a court martial for Sen Kelly in this case. I keep saying over and over that it's a big mistake to underestimate Trump. And let's face it, he's enjoying himself doing this. No wonder he doesn't take a salary.

Cameras Are Everywhere. Deal With It.

A typical event in the On Patrol: Live TV show involves a cop pulling a driver over for suspected DUI. The cop walks up to the driver's window and requests that the driver step out. All of a sudden, the driver notices there's a guy with a big camera filming the scene and realizes what this could mean: their face will be on national TV with a show that leads its time slot in the 25-54 demographic, which is another way of saying that by the next day, their DUI arrest will be all over town.

"I don't want to be filmed!" the driver protests. "I demand that you stop filming!"

"It's just a documentary," the officer usually replies. "They're just filming a documentary."

The other night, a driver protested more than usual, which had no impact. "Anyone can film out in public," the officer continued. "They can film you, you can film us. That's the law." Which is another way of saying cameras are everywhere. Deal with it.

This seems to bother libertarians more than just about anyone else, which is puzzling, since libertarians generally favor the fewest possible restraints on individual conduct. They'll argue all day for your right to film police activity, but they'll resist to the end the right of the police to film you, for pretty much the same reason a driver doesn't want anyone filming him failing a field sobriety test in front of a national audience.

Back in the day, local newspapers regularly printed the police blotter with news like "Mr Silas Murray of Sparta Center was booked Tuesday night for DUI", but apparently this wasn't the same thing as having your picture published, or maybe people seeing you on national TV falling over during the one-leg-stand test. The easiest way to prevent this, of course, is simply prudent behavior like not drinking and driving.

But now the long-standing libertarian objection to red light cameras has morphed into a more general panic over automated license plate readers.

The Associated Press is shocked, shocked, to discover that Customs and Border Protection has expanded their surveillance network beyond the “100 miles inland from every border” as authorized in the Patriot Act.

Worse yet is their stunned research showing license plate readers (APLR’s) are being connected to various other public and private sector mechanisms to identify travel patterns of U.S. citizens and collate them to facial recognition software applications.

. . . [Conservative Treehouse] has been writing about this surveillance issue for well over a decade. The introduction of Palantir facial recognition, to the overall database of social media information and private identity information, now makes it very easy for the government to simply point a camera at your face and get every scintilla of information about us [sic].

Almost all of the privacy advocates have given up trying to resist the outcome. However, I am not one of them. All it will take is a small mistake in the AI development programming, and people will see quickly just how dangerous this is.

A story at KPBS San Diego suggests the general level of panic:

The nondescript black cameras are mounted near each entrance of the Las Americas Premium Outlets, capturing the license plate, make and model of every car that enters the mall parking lot.

“As soon as you come in, it's in the system,” said a former worker with Simon Property Group. The company is the largest owner of shopping malls in the country, including Las Americas, the sprawling complex next to the San Ysidro border crossing.

At first, he embraced the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based surveillance technology company. The former employee believed the ALPR system would help address shoplifting and solve serious crimes that occasionally happened around the mall, like robberies and vehicle theft.

And then he realized the power — and scope — of the license plate surveillance system. Flock can help users analyze patterns of movement and potential associations between drivers. And Simon Property Group gave several law enforcement agencies open access to search and receive notifications from its ALPR system.

“If people knew more about it, I would say people will obviously be pissed off,” he said. “Nobody wants big brother watching you on every single little thing.”

During the George Floyd riots, our neighbor put up a big WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ALSO BLAH BLAH BLAH sign in their front yard. I very briefly cogitated somehow spiriting it away in the dead of night until I almost immediately realized that, dead of night or no, my action would be caught by a minimum of three cameras from three different points of view, with my face clearly recognizable, and I thought better of any such project. Thus did cameras reinforce ordinary prudence.

Soon enough, the neighbors put the house on the market, and the realtor spirited the sign away in furtherance of making the property saleable. On camera or not, this was perfectly fine. It began to strike me that in almost any conceivable situation, cameras tend to enforce appropriate community expectations. If you think your actions will be on camera, you think twice. The KPBS story continues,

The use of license plate reader technology has long been a flashpoint between law enforcement and privacy advocates.

In recent years, California has established certain guardrails for ALPR networks owned by police departments and other public entities, including restrictions on how the data can be shared. The systems are also subject to public records requests.

But those safeguards don’t apply to the many private businesses — including Home Depot, Lowe's, the Southwestern Yacht Club, Fashion Valley mall and homeowners associations — that give police access to their license plate readers.

These private systems effectively serve as a wide-ranging extension of law enforcement's surveillance apparatus — even though the private businesses are not subject to the same public scrutiny and transparency requirements.

Wait a moment. Why would an upscale retailer, a big-box store, or an HOA want to install license plate readers? Almost certainly to deter theft, vandalism, or other potential crime. Should any such occur, store security or the HOA would indeed share such information with the police, along with other security video they have irrespective of the ALPR. If the video isn't clear enough to get a plate number, the ALPR could certainly help. It's possible that retailers could make other potential use of the information for marketing or whatever, but certainly the primary use would be to deter crime.

But why would an ordinary solid citizen be worrying about whether where he drove could wind up in someone's data base? Is he really worried that a trip to Home Depot could be used against him? They've already got his receipt and the card he used to pay, and they've already got video of him in the checkout line. This would only be a problem if the cops were trying to trace the shovel he used to bury a body, not if he were picking up some spackle.

The real problem we see often enough is that some solid citizens drive to the wrong part of town for the wrong reasons. They get caught at this often enough anyhow, but this could make tracking them just that much easier. Or they go to motels over a long lunch for trysts, or they say they're going someplace for a business meeting and wind up someplace else with someone else. I suppose license plate readers make these people nervous, but they really ought to recognize that technology has already been way ahead of them for a very long time.

Cameras are everywhere. It isn't Big Brother, it mostly just reinforces ordinary prudence.