Turkey, Tragedy, and Trump’s Cognitive Unraveling

A young Guardswoman dies in an avoidable attack, and the president responds with lies, rage, and a beer-pong grift bearing the presidential seal.

Good morning! This holiday’s national mood could best be captured by the image of Specialist Sarah Beckstrom’s grieving parents on one end of the country and Donald Trump waving around a beer pong kit with the presidential seal on the other. If there’s a clearer metaphor for the moral degradation of American governance, please don’t tell me. I’ve endured enough.

The Thanksgiving tragedy began with a preventable horror. A 20-year-old West Virginia National Guard specialist, deployed to Washington, D.C., not for war, not for disaster response, but for Donald Trump’s latest cosplay as America’s Sheriff, was gunned down in an ambush mere blocks from the White House. Beckstrom was in D.C. because Trump, whose understanding of “public safety” involves hurling uniformed teenagers at imagined enemies, illegally deployed more than 2,000 Guard members to act as municipal police after a federal judge explicitly said he couldn’t. Trump’s solution to this tragedy, naturally, is to send 500 more Guard members into the city. If this presidency had a slogan, it would be: “If you’re already in a hole, keep digging. Then declare the hole beautiful. The biggest hole anyone’s ever seen.”

Tragedy is never allowed to remain tragedy in Trump-world. It is instantly transmuted into fuel. No sooner had Trump informed the troops, midway through a troop call that felt like a QVC livestream hosted by a concussed game-show host, that Beckstrom had died, he pivoted from grief to xenophobia as seamlessly as a televangelist lunging for the credit-card machine. The suspect, an Afghan national who previously worked with CIA-linked units hunting terrorists, became the lone data point Trump needed to declare all Afghan refugees suspect, immigration from “Third World Countries” to be permanently paused, and naturalized Americans subject to hypothetical “denaturalization” proceedings if they fail to maintain “domestic tranquility,” which in Trump’s usage now translates to “anything that annoys Dear Leader.”

And in perhaps the most galling detail of all, the suspect’s visa, the very legal status Trump insists is proof of Biden’s treasonous incompetence, was approved not by the Biden administration, but by Trump’s own in April 2025. His administration cleared the man he now cites as Exhibit A in his push for mass deportations and demographic purges. The system he runs approved him. But instead of grappling with that, or even acknowledging it, Trump chose the easier path: externalize blame, inflame public fear, and frame the entire refugee population as a national threat. Cognitive decline or not, the political instinct remains the same, weaponize the tragedy he helped create, then scream “stupid!” at the first reporter who dares to bring up the facts.

Then came the press gaggle, the real window into the president’s mental unraveling. Press gaggles are usually where presidents strain for composure, the ceremonial ritual of at least pretending to respect the press, the facts, and the citizens observing both. Trump, however, has entered a new phase, one where the last remaining layers of inhibition simply aren’t firing anymore.

When a reporter gently pointed out that federal officials had confirmed Afghan evacuees were vetted in 2021, Trump snapped like a brittle holiday ornament:

“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?”

It wasn’t the theatrical bullying of 2016, the carnival-barker dominance game he used to play. This was different. This was raw, unfiltered, unstrategic. It was the kind of impulsive lashing out you hear from someone whose cognitive brakes simply don’t work anymore, the deterioration of internal guardrails, the collapse of the boundary between thought and speech. He didn’t even try to walk it back, or mask it, or turn it into a joke. He seemed unaware he’d even crossed a line. Disinhibition isn’t just rudeness; it’s neurological.

From there he veered into a slurry of half-formed grievances about Biden “letting them in,” about Afghans going “cuckoo,” and about Somalis “ripping us off”, a racist grab-bag delivered with a cadence suggesting the TelePrompter had been replaced with a malfunctioning player piano. It was the sound of a man who cannot regulate himself, who cannot resist the impulse to attack whatever stimulus appears before him. For a president, it’s dangerous. For a president facing daily demands for judgment, restraint, and factual clarity, it’s catastrophic.While immigration lawyers, constitutional scholars, and anyone with a baseline understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment clutched their temples until ibuprofen became a controlled substance, Trump stayed busy posting an all-night immigration manifesto that read like someone fed Stephen Miller a bowl of expired eggnog and dared him to create policy. DHS was left scrambling to explain why the president is now threatening to strip citizenship from U.S. citizens like some kind of late-stage Ottoman sultan, and why green-card holders from nineteen nations are suddenly being “reexamined,” as if they’re mislabeled tomatoes at Customs.

And here’s where Texas, the spiritual laboratory for Trumpist governance, enters the chat. Because while Trump insists that Americans everywhere are begging to deputize themselves as foot soldiers in his immigration crusade, the reality is that even in Texas, even in Dallas, even among police chiefs who have spent their careers being tough-on-everything, the answer to ICE’s recruitment drive is: absolutely not, and also please stop calling.

Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux took one look at ICE’s offer—to yank officers off homicide investigations and traffic enforcement so they can clock overtime helping federal agents detain busboys, and said no thank you, even after ICE offered him a $25 million reimbursement package. Twenty-five million dollars is a lot of money. But Comeaux, perhaps dreading the idea of explaining to Dallas residents that their 911 call went unanswered because officers were out raiding taco trucks, concluded that transforming his department into ICE Dallas-Fort Worth would undermine everything the department has done to rebuild trust and reduce violent crime. Dallas leaders backed him up, choosing public safety over political spectacle. In Trump’s Texas, that passes for outright rebellion.

Houston found itself on the opposite end of that pendulum, trapped in a backlash after Mayor John Whitmire casually acknowledged some level of cooperation with ICE. Suddenly, calls from the Houston PD to ICE shot up 1000 percent, measurable proof that ICE, drunk on Trump’s mandate, has stuffed the national crime database full of administrative “warrants” that aren’t signed by judges but nonetheless trigger arrests during routine traffic stops. One of those arrests came after a domestic-violence victim dialed 911 for help. In response to community outrage, the HPD clarified that it “does not ask about immigration status,” a statement that became instantly less comforting when paired with “but we are required to detain anyone with an ICE warrant.” In other words: “We don’t check immigration status… unless ICE calls them a criminal, in which case we do everything but embroider their name on a holding cell.”

Cities everywhere are getting squeezed: cooperate with ICE and burn your relationship with immigrant communities, or refuse and risk Trump sending in federal agents—or, if he’s feeling especially theatrical, the National Guard. ICE is openly bragging about “supercharging” its hiring and “multiplying partnerships,” which is phrased cheerfully enough until you realize they’re talking about conscripting local police departments into a deportation army accessorized with quarterly cash bonuses like some dystopian version of a Costco rewards program.

In the president’s private sector hustle, he is licensing the presidential seal to a beer pong set marketed by the Trump Bible website. The seal, normally a symbol of sobriety and constitutional legitimacy, is now emblazoned on plastic cups one normally associates with fraternity basements and morning-after regrets. The presidential seal, which countless civil servants guard with reverence, is now being used to sell party equipment by a sitting president who is also accusing migrants of invading the nation, stripping Green Card holders of rights, and sending the National Guard into American cities. It’s the political equivalent of a televangelist selling holy water out of the trunk of a Lamborghini.

So here we are, limping out of the holiday weekend with Marz trotting proudly along, burning off his Thanksgiving feast, while the president proposes mass deportations, the National Guard mourns a young woman whose death never should have happened, Texas cities refuse to join ICE’s street-theater dragnet, and the commander-in-chief violates federal law to sell beer pong sets.

America: where national tragedy, authoritarian flirtation, and deeply embarrassing merchandise somehow all occupy the same 48-hour news cycle.

Trump assures us America is “the hottest country anywhere in the world” now. And if by “hot” he means “smoldering,” he may finally be telling the truth.