President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Specialist Sarah Beckstrom of the West Virginia National Guard had passed away after being shot near the White House the day before. Trump delivered the news as families across the United States were celebrating Thanksgiving, saying, “I must unfortunately tell you that just seconds before I went on right now, I heard that Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia, one of the Guardsmen that we’re talking about — highly respected, young, magnificent person — started service in 2023, outstanding in every way, she’s just passed away.” “She’s no longer with us, she’s looking down on us right now,” the president continued. “Her parents are with her. This just happened. She was savagely attacked, she’s dead, not with us. Incredible person. Outstanding in every single way, in every department. Just horrible.” Trump’s announcement comes just hours after Beckstrom’s father revealed that she was not expected to survive her injuries. “I’m holding her hand right now,” Gary Beckstrom said earlier on Thursday. “She has a mortal wound. It’s not going to be a recovery.” Beckstrom, 20, had reportedly volunteered to serve over the Thanksgiving holiday so that other National Guard members could spend the time at home with their families. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. “She volunteered, as did many of those guardsmen and women, so other people could be home with their families. Yet, now, their families are in hospital rooms with them while they are fighting for their lives,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “They answered the call, they took the charge, they volunteered, they put their lives on the line for people they don’t even know, and that unfortunately is becoming a reality more and more for the members of law enforcement,” United States Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro added. The suspect, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, entered the United States in 2021 as part of President Joe Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome,” which — as The Daily Wire previously reported — allowed roughly 77,000 Afghan nationals into the country.

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) posted a performance piece on Sunday — wringing her hands as she blamed the recently-ended government shutdown on President Donald Trump and claimed that he had almost single-handedly ruined Thanksgiving because of it — and got an impromptu review from actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman. Murray, who voted to keep the government closed — and thus deprive millions of Americans of their food stamp (SNAP) benefits — more than a dozen times, claimed that Trump and Republicans were taking major steps to deprive families of food assistance as the holidays approached. Her main point of contention appeared to be the fact that President Trump had refused to override her vote — and the votes of a majority of Democrats — and do what they would not do, and she insisted that he was the real reason families were being made to suffer. WATCH: It’s nearly Thanksgiving and everyone should remember that Trump fought all the way to the Supreme Court to deny families SNAP benefits this month. All of this after Trump & Republicans passed the largest cuts to SNAP in HISTORY this summer. It’s fundamentally immoral. pic.twitter.com/tiDol5wegG — Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) November 24, 2025 “It’s nearly Thanksgiving and everyone should remember that Trump fought all the way to the Supreme Court to deny families SNAP benefits this month. All of this after Trump & Republicans passed the largest cuts to SNAP in HISTORY this summer. It’s fundamentally immoral,” she said. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. Bateman chimed in with her review, addressing everything from the actress and her demeanor to the staging and the setting chosen for the video. WATCH: #SocialMediaVideoCritique Per: @sunnylohmann – There are many unfortunate issues with this piece. – The actress appears to be at once under-rehearsed, and also weary of the task of performing. – Careful casting is a must when a project has an exacting director. The impression… https://t.co/DlAxrq3NyE — Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) November 25, 2025 “There are many unfortunate issues with this piece,” Bateman began, starting in on Murray immediately. “The actress appears to be at once under-rehearsed, and also weary of the task of performing. Careful casting is a must when a project has an exacting director.” “The impression given here is that the director’s efforts to elicit a proper performance caused the actress to check out during her takes,” Bateman continued. “The resulting dialogue delivery is halting. Awkward pauses within the compound word ‘Thanksgiving’ and before some prepositions are perhaps an effort by the actress to sabotage the piece itself.” When she’d finished with the actress and her awkward delivery, Bateman turned her attention to the staging of the shot — and some of the issues that a good camera operator would certainly have noticed before making the film public. “The utilitarian lighting appears to have been applied hastily and implies a parking garage or other industrial settings,” she noted. “The camera frame is vertical with some hazy video filled in at the sides. Avoid this at all costs. This implies an amateur effort. Properly orient your camera horizontally.” “Finally, the setting is extremely distracting. The first impression is that the actress is standing in a bathroom stall. The low wall on her left as the semi-private partition. The orange object on the floor appears to be a toilet with closed toilet seat cover,” Bateman concluded. “The silver pipe on the wall suggests an old-fashioned flush system, where the tank is installed above. And the red box serving as the ‘flush’ button.”

The father of Sarah Beckstrom, one of the two National Guard members allegedly shot by Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, said that she has a “mortal wound” and is not expected to survive. “I’m holding her hand right now,” Gary Beckstrom said. “She has a mortal wound. It’s not going to be a recovery.” ?Sad news: The father of 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom from the WV National Guard says her death is all but certain. "She has a mortal wound. It's not going to be a recovery." pic.twitter.com/IJMIOYQ6th — Raylan Givens (@JewishWarrior13) November 27, 2025 Beckstrom, 20, an Army Specialist, had volunteered to work the Thanksgiving holiday so that her fellow soldiers could go home to their families, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News Thursday. “She volunteered to be there on Thanksgiving, working today,” Bondi said. “She volunteered, as did many of those guardsmen and women, so other people could be home with their families. Yet, now, their families are in hospital rooms with them while they are fighting for their lives.”  “The accused gunman had been part of an Afghan ‘partner force’ trained and supported by the C.I.A. in the southern province of Kandahar, officials said. An Afghan intelligence official said the suspect had served in one of what were known as Zero Units, Afghan paramilitary forces trained to target the Taliban and that were accused of widespread killings of civilians,” The New York Times reported. On Thursday, United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro made it clear that if either Beckstrom or Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, the other Guard member who was shot, did not survive, the federal government would seek charges of murder in the first degree against the suspect, making him eligible for the death penalty. Speaking at a press conference Thursday morning, Pirro stated, “As we stand here today, the charges that are appropriate right now are three counts of assault with intent to kill while armed, a violation of DC code 22–401 and DC code 22–4502. He will also be charged  possession of a firearm during a crime of violence. He faces 15 years under assault with the intent to kill. We intend to continue monitoring what the charges will be, depending upon the well-being of the guardsmen. We are praying that they survive and that the highest charge will not have to be murder in the first degree.” “But make no mistake,” she declared. “If they do not, that will certainly be the charge: murder in the first degree. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi is committed to a thorough and impartial investigation where we will hold this perpetrator accountable under the full weight of the law.”

What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? Why do we eat turkey? How long has football been associated with Thanksgiving? Are Americans still honoring the spirit of the holiday?  The Daily Wire’s Morning Wire interviewed historian Melanie Kirkpatrick to get to the bottom of these questions – and more.  According to Kirkpatrick, author of “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience,” Thanksgiving goes back even before the Pilgrims.  “Many of the European explorers who came to this continent called days of thanksgiving, and of course, the original thanksgivings were called by Native American populations,” Kirkpatrick explained. “The pilgrims, after their first harvest, they gathered their people together and called a day of thanksgiving,” she explained. “And I’ll point out that it’s very wonderful when you consider that half of the pilgrims had died between the arrival of the pilgrims and the day of thanksgiving. But nonetheless, they gave thanks for the blessings of the harvest and for being together. And then, of course, Native Americans joined them.” “There were about 90 Native Americans who joined them, and they celebrated for three days,” Kirkpatrick said. “We know all of that because thanks to two articles, two commentaries by two of the pilgrims.” However, Kirkpatrick said, “a lot of the other stuff we traditionally associate with the pilgrims is not necessarily true.” “There’s a famous painting of the first Thanksgiving, showing the pilgrims having a meal outside. That’s true,” she said. “But if you look at the other items in the painting, not so true. For example, the pilgrims are all dressed in dark colors. And in truth, they wore bright colors, which goes against what we all learned in kindergarten about how the pilgrims dressed.” “Similarly, the Native Americans who were there were depicted as wearing elaborate headdresses, like you’d see in the Plains Indians. But that wasn’t true either,” she said. “They wore maybe one or two feathers.” Did they really eat turkey at the first Thanksgiving? Kirkpatrick says we don’t know what exactly was eaten. However, one of the pilgrims mentions “the great store of wild turkey that was available.” “So they probably had turkey,” she said, adding that they had venison, too.  “We know they had venison because the Indians brought as a gift a bunch of deer that they had killed,” Kirkpatrick said. “That was a standard feature of Thanksgiving Day up through … parts of the 19th century actually.” Turkey became common on Thanksgiving as there were so many wild turkeys in New England, the author said.  “I just saw a flock of turkeys out my window the other day – I live in Connecticut. So they were easy to find,” she said. “Also, they were, by the end of the 18th, early 19th century, they were domesticated, so they were special.” Kirkpatrick added, though, that in New England in the 19th century, the central feature of the Thanksgiving Day meal was actually chicken pot pie. “I know people in New England whose families still have that tradition of having chicken pot pie around the time of the holiday – not necessarily on Thanksgiving Day,” she said. “And as the holidays spread out west, American settlers brought their own food traditions with them. So you find beef being eaten on Thanksgiving instead of turkey, and as settlers from other places came to this country, they brought their own traditions with them, like lasagna and stir fries, curries. So the meal is still evolving.” What do we know about the origins of the official Thanksgiving holiday?  “The early settlers in New England fixed the dates of their thanksgivings by community or by church,” Kirkpatrick said. “And then the governor of the New England colony would name a date.”  The celebrations were very “ad hoc,” she said. But this all changed when the “Mother of Thanksgiving” stepped in to make the holiday official.  “Along came Sarah Josepha Hale, who was the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine, the most popular and most widely read magazine of the early part of the 19th century,” Kirkpatrick said. “She was from New Hampshire, and she adored the thanksgiving holiday, and she decided to try to make it national. She saw it as part of American culture, part of our heritage, and she tried to persuade presidents of the United States to name a Thanksgiving Day.” “Hale used the power of her magazine to write about Thanksgiving and encourage governors to coordinate the date so that they would have the same date,” she continued. “Finally, as the Civil War was approaching, she intensified her campaign. And in 1863, she wrote to Lincoln asking him to name a date when the whole country could celebrate. He did, and in 1863 was the first date that at least part of the country, the North, the Union, celebrated on one day.” “Every president since Lincoln has named a day, an official date of Thanksgiving,” the historian explained. “Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1941 that Thanksgiving became official. Congress passed a resolution naming the fourth Thursday of November the date of Thanksgiving, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law.”  Thanksgiving And Football  Relatively soon after football developed in the United States, it was connected to Thanksgiving.  The tradition of tying football with Thanksgiving started to grow around the 1870s, Kirkpatrick said. “The first football games took place in the late 1860s between Rutgers and Princeton,” she said. “And then there was a college championship game that was played in New York City, and New Yorkers really got into it, and it was played on Thanksgiving Day. So that tradition in New York sets the scene, sets the trend, and other cities followed suit. And then high schools and community groups would have it by the 1890s.” “There was a tradition of having games on Thanksgiving morning, and the guys would go off to the games and the women would stay home and make dinner, and everybody would reconvene in the afternoon and celebrate Thanksgiving,” she said.  How Thanksgiving has evolved  Discussing the evolution of Thanksgiving, Kirkpatrick said the “value has shifted somewhat,” but people still associate the holiday with charity and family and friends.  “It’s not as religious a holiday as it used to be,” she explained. “For the first couple of hundred years, people went to church on Thanksgiving morning, too, before they went to football. But we don’t see that as much. It’s still religious in the sense that if a family is going to say grace before a meal, it’ll be on Thanksgiving.” “But the values of generosity to the poor, for example, have long been associated with Thanksgiving,” she said. “The earliest example I found of that was, I think, 1624. And today, people participate in helping, making sure that the military gets a good Thanksgiving dinner, and prisoners and people who have a hard time affording the meal.” “I think maybe the saddest image in American culture is somebody who has no place to go on Thanksgiving Day,” Kirkpatrick added. “It’s a day that’s associated with family and friendship, as well as food.”

The two heroic National Guardmen shot Wednesday by a crazed Afghan man while deployed to secure Washington, D.C., have been identified. The service members are West Virginia National Guardsmen, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe, 24, United States Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro revealed during a press conference Thursday morning. Both Beckstrom and Wolfe “were sworn in less than 24 hours before they were shot on the street in Washington,” Pirro said. “They were uniformed members of the West Virginia National Guard, and they were in DC to keep DC safe pursuant to President Trump’s executive order to make DC safe and beautiful,” Pirro said. “They answered the call, they took the charge, they volunteered, they put their lives on the line for people they don’t even know, and that unfortunately is becoming a reality more and more for the members of law enforcement,” she said. Beckstrom had volunteered to work the Thanksgiving holiday so that her fellow soldiers could go home to their families, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News Thursday. “She volunteered to be there on Thanksgiving, working today,” Bondi said. “She volunteered, as did many of those guardsmen and women, so other people could be home with their families. Yet, now, their families are in hospital rooms with them while they are fighting for their lives.” Beckstrom and Wolfe both emerged from surgery on Thursday and remain in critical condition. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. This morning, we can confirm that my constituent Andrew Wolfe, 24, from Berkeley County, and his fellow National Guardsman Sarah Beckstrom, 20, have successfully made it through surgery but are still in critical condition. Their families are with them in the hospital. I am… pic.twitter.com/brcCRe0Ftm — Rep. Riley M. Moore (@RepRileyMoore) November 27, 2025 “They’re receiving the finest medical care, their families are with them now,” Pirro said. “They are critical … it’s not clear how this is gonna end up, but let me be perfectly clear about how it will end up in this office. If one of them is to pass, and God forbid that happens, this is a murder one, period, end of the story. We are praying on a day like today when families come together in America, and they hold hands around the Thanksgiving table, I beg you, I beseech you to pray for these two young people that they survive,” she said. The suspect, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, entered the United States in 2021 as part of President Joe Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome,” which allowed roughly 77,000 Afghan nationals into the country during the botched withdrawal of American troops, the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Wire late Wednesday. Lakanwal is now charged with three counts of assault with intent to kill while armed, possession of a firearm during a crime of violence. He faces 15 years in prison for assault with the intent to kill. If either one of the two soldiers succumbs to their injuries, the federal government will seek charges of murder in the first degree against the suspect, making him eligible for the death penalty. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump described the attack as a “monstrous ambush,” blaming the Biden administration for waving the alleged shooter into the U.S. “This attack underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation. The last administration let in 20 million unknown and unvetted foreigners from all over the world,” Trump said.