Russia’s pounding of Ukraine continues: A barrage of drones and missiles launched on Kyiv early this morning killed at least fifteen people, including four children, and injured forty-five, Ukrainian officials said. Just another day trying to live while in the crosshairs of Vladimir Putin. Happy Thursday.
Shots and Prayers
by Andrew Egger
It was the first midweek chapel service of the school year for the kids of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The students, as young as 4 years old, had walked from the school to the parish church next door to hear God’s word and worship as another year of learning got underway. It was a year whose scriptural theme was to be Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know full well the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for your misfortune, plans that will offer you a future filled with hope.”
Then, just minutes into the service, a shooter outside opened fire, and the future was filled instead with unimaginable horror. A hail of bullets shattered the church’s stained-glass windows and rained down on the children and congregation, many of whom dove for cover beneath their pews. By the time the carnage stopped, two kids—one 8 years old, another 10—were dead. Fourteen others were injured, alongside three adults. Two were in critical condition as of yesterday, but police said all are expected to survive. The shooter is dead by their own hand.
Even in a nation where these attacks of terror have become their own sort of horrible routine, this one stood out as unbearable. What do you do with interview footage of a fifth-grade kid talking about the panic of nobody knowing what to do or where to run, because they’d only drilled for an active-shooter scenario at school, not at chapel? How do you bottle the unease you feel hearing how stoic he sounds—how routine it feels—as he describes his friend laying on top of him, shielding him from bullets? Where do you put the helpless rage?
Many Americans these days know how they’d answer that question: They put it online.1 As the mind reels at yet another display of evil beyond understanding, they cope with it by sublimating it as fodder for the ever-present all-out political war.
On the Republican side, this sublimation involved paring the shooting down to its most politically inflammatory elements: that the perpetrator seems to have been transgender, that the target was a church, that the apparent video manifesto revealed the shooter had written “KILL DONALD TRUMP” on a magazine.
“MORE DEMOCRAT VIOLENCE!” wrote million-follower influencer Nick Sortor on X, adding: “When are we going to FINALLY admit trans violence is a MASSIVE problem?!”
A fuller reading of the killer’s apparent sloganeering revealed a more complicated picture, of a personality that seemed shaped more by the nihilism of the most degraded parts of the internet than by partisan attachment. In a video apparently uploaded ahead of the attack, the killer lovingly pans the camera over the equipment of death. Scrawled over the magazines and weapons are dozens of slogans obviously intended to offend and shock. The names of other mass shooters. An abundance of racial slurs: “Kick a Sp*c,” “Fart N*gga,” “Extra Thicc Jew Gas.” And throughout, a seething anti-Catholic hatred. “WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?” reads a message on one magazine. “Take this, all of you, and eat!” reads the inscription on a shotgun. In the back of the room stands a target over which the shooter has affixed a picture of Jesus Christ.
But GOP accusations of “Democrat violence” weren’t the only hollow utterances in the shooting’s aftermath. Democrats also got into the act of post-mass shooting sublimation: The now-ritual denunciation of the very idea of praying for the victims and their families. “Prayer is not freaking enough,” wrote former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki on X. “Prayers [do] not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”
“Prayers aren’t working,” wrote liberal commentator Brian Krassenstein. “If prayers worked a house of prayer wouldn’t experience this.” Krassenstein didn’t intend it this way, but his remark eerily echoed the shooter’s own gibe: Where is your God now?
Maybe these commentators, and the many online posters who voiced similar sentiments, are right that thoughts and prayers don’t actually do anything to blunt America’s miserable spate of mass shootings.2 Certainly one can understand why they don’t want to see only thoughts and prayers—they also want to see our country implement policies to make carrying out such shootings more difficult.
But there’s one thing prayer is undeniably good for at times like these: heaving one back out of the awful, soul-annihilating sludge of yet another round of post-shooting political discourse. It fixes the mind not on one’s ever-present political opponents but on the sufferers, in a discipline of sorrow and solidarity for those whose lives have been shattered by yet another attack. Dashing to social media to fire off hot takes after a tragedy feels good because it feels like doing something. But sometimes suffering with those who suffer is the only real thing you can do.
A Still-Unfolding CDC Purge
by Jonathan Cohn
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the agency with direct responsibility for protecting America’s health—may have just lost its director and four other seasoned leaders, evidently because they dared to push back on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade against vaccinations.
That tentative “may” is necessary because the story is still unfolding this morning. But already it’s shaping up to be a crisis of governance as chaotic and unnerving as anything we’ve seen in the Trump era.
It started late Wednesday afternoon, when the Washington Post reported that Kennedy was about to oust CDC Director Susan Monarez, who has been in the job for less than a month. Just after 5 p.m., HHS seemed to make her firing official with a tweet saying she was “no longer director.”
That’s when things really started to go sideways. At a little after 7 p.m., prominent D.C. attorney Mark Zaid tweeted that he and his partner Abbe Lowell were representing Monarez—and that she had indeed “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives” from Kennedy. But, they added, she had “neither resigned nor yet been fired.”
Eventually the White House put out a statement to some reporters in which it said Monarez had “been terminated” (yes, a lot of passive voice happening!) because she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” But in a pair of midnight tweets, Zaid responded that the termination notice Monarez received—apparently from the White House personnel office—was not sufficient because the CDC director is a presidential appointee, meaning Trump has to fire Monarez directly.
The precise clash or sequence of clashes that precipitated all of this is not fully clear. But there are some key details in the Post story, co-written by staff reporter Dan Diamond, who laid it out in a live video discussion on The Bulwark last night.
And there’s no mystery about the broader conflict playing out. Kennedy has been on a mission to restrict access and to pull research funding for major vaccines, which he says have been shown to cause severe harms that far outweigh their benefits. The scientists at the CDC—like mainstream scientists all over the United States and all over the world—have found these claims preposterous and frightening, thinking among other things about the measles outbreak that just tore through West Texas and killed two unvaccinated children.
Among those alarmed scientists has been Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who along with three other career officials resigned on Wednesday. Daskalakis (whose resignation was first reported by our own Sam Stein) explained his thinking in an extraordinary and blunt resignation letter he posted to social media, saying that he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”
Daskalakis didn’t specify exactly what event or decision triggered his departure, although two sources told me that—as another passage in the initial Zaid tweet implied—Kennedy had been demanding Monarez fire Daskalakis and other dissidents.
The status of Monarez may solidify quickly, maybe even by the time you’ve read this, presumably with Trump reprising a version of his signature line from The Apprentice. But whatever happens to her, the CDC is losing decades’ worth of expertise and experience—this, after losing still more leaders and a big chunk of staff in the DOGE purges.
And while the CDC’s record is far from perfect—what organization’s record is?—its officials and personnel are the front-line troops protecting Americans from public health threats. That includes every kind of communicable disease imaginable, from seasonal flu and food poisoning to potential pandemics and bioterror attacks.
There’s simply no way the agency can function normally or effectively when it’s in this sort of disarray. It’s hard not to wonder if maybe this is what Kennedy wants—and whether Trump is, at the very least, content to let that happen.
“It is always unclear to me what’s more prominent, their incompetence or their malice,” Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and a former Biden administration official, told me by phone last night. “It’s hard to tell in this case. But either way it’s alarming and dangerous.”
AROUND THE BULWARK
EXCLUSIVE: JAKE SULLIVAN joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod, where he revealed that he’s told Dems to vote against weapons to Israel.
How Do You Fight in a City? On Shield of the Republic, ELIOT and ERIC welcome JOHN SPENCER, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project and chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum.
Rakes. Dems. Steps. LAUREN EGAN reports in The Opposition on the summer meeting of the DNC. Lots of sniping from opponents and supporters of DNC chair Ken Martin.
The Sub Heard Round the World. Signs of defiance are there, if you know where to look, writes MONA CHAREN.
No, Trump Can’t Just Impose the Death Penalty for All Murders in D.C. Most crimes in the capital, including most killings, are not federal crimes, observes KIM WEHLE.
Putin and Trump, Still Colluding… Every time the president’s apologists swear he’s not conniving with the Russian dictator, he does it again. WILL SALETAN on this predictable cycle.
Quick Hits
COMPLICATING THE BOLTON PICTURE: The FBI raid on John Bolton’s home last week looked like one of the most outrageous politically motivated attacks yet by the Trump Justice Department. But new reporting from the New York Times yesterday suggests a more complicated story behind the charges, claiming that the investigation into Bolton, a longtime critic of the president, actually “began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. officials collected information that appeared to show he had mishandled classified information.” The Times goes on:
The United States gathered data from an adversarial country’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case that remains open. . . .
No charges have been filed against Mr. Bolton. One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Mr. Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said. . . .
It is not clear what country intercepted Mr. Bolton’s private emails, but Iran, Russia and China all would have had intense interest in his communications while he was the national security adviser. Because of his role in helping Mr. Trump kill a top Iranian general, Mr. Bolton had a security detail to protect him from potential Iranian retaliation, but Mr. Trump abruptly ended it the day after he was sworn in for his second term.
If this reporting is true, it suggests that the raid on Bolton’s home and the big push to publicize it was less a radical new prosecutorial step than a continuation of the trend we’ve seen so far in Trump 2.0: Exhaustive investigation and publication of every iota of possible wrongdoing for Trump foes, ambivalence and even clemency toward possible wrongdoing by Trump friends—and, of course, by Trump himself.
WEAPONIZING THE MORTGAGE REGULATORS: Donald Trump’s attempted firing of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is part of his longstanding campaign to reduce the independence of the central bank. But the nature of his attack on her also raises questions about whether he is illegally weaponizing the Federal Housing Finance Agency to dig up potentially damaging information on his various opponents. Over at the New Republic, Greg Sargent notes that a lawsuit now filed by Cook may help us get to the bottom of these questions:
The real question this raises is: Why is [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac head William] Pulte scrutinizing mortgages that just happen to belong to many high-profile opponents of Trump, and how did he come to select these targets? Experts recently told me that this use of the FHFA mortgage-fraud process appears highly suspect at best. When a Washington Post reporter asked FHFA to identify the procedural basis for Pulte to single out these targets, she received no answer. . . .
Guess what: We may soon learn more on this front. Cook just announced that she’s suing to challenge her firing, and people with experience in mortgage law and governance tell me that Cook’s lawyer, well-known D.C. attorney Abbe Lowell, has a major opening in the coming litigation. He can use the discovery process to shed light on why Pulte targeted these mortgages and on any White House involvement in that.
ROOT AND BRANCH: Writing in Politico this morning, Jasper Craven goes deep on an underappreciated part of Pete Hegseth’s tenure as defense secretary: The academic purge he has spearheaded at institutions like West Point.
To Graham Parsons, the nomination of Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary at once offered a fascinating case study and an immediate threat to his career.
Since 2012, Parsons has been a professor at West Point, the U.S. Army’s premier educational institution, where he has taught cadets military ethics and researched the knotty relationship between gender and warfare. Hegseth was a paragon of Parsons’ scholarship, a tattooed alpha male whose vision of military service is built on undermining and expelling female and transgender troops. . . .
Days after his confirmation, Hegseth blasted out a memo to military school faculty prohibiting instruction that could be in any way construed as promoting “Critical Race Theory, Gender Ideology, and DEI.” Then he gathered service academy leaders on a teleconference. Beamed into each campus was a clear order: Focus on history, warfighting and engineering, and hobble much of the rest. Department heads moved quickly, requesting faculty review their syllabi for materials potentially in conflict with Hegseth’s dictate.
The list of texts Parsons submitted focused on affirmative action, feminism and political theory. One reckoned with the racist underpinnings of famed philosopher Immanuel Kant. He expected they would survive because he believed that “the academy was preparing to fight back.” It didn’t.
Cheap Shots
Which is what I’m doing right now, I guess.
Cards on the table: I am a Christian and do not think this is true.
Your discussion of prayer assumes that the prayers are sincere and meaningful. They are clearly not. When you have the power to do something about a problem, and you refuse to do it, any prayers which you offer are blasphemous hypocrisy.
What is there to even say about the shooting? 20 six year olds at Newtown didn’t do anything. 19 ten year olds at Uvalde didn’t do anything. The COUNTLESS victims of school shootings outside of these haven’t done anything. Rage is all there is. When is it the time to talk about more than thoughts and prayers? It makes me sick in the stomach that we will just move on in a day or two.