At least two media outlets responded to an Afghan national’s attack on two National Guardsmen by fretting over how President Donald Trump’s reaction might hurt refugees.

The suspect in the shooting, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national admitted to the United States in 2021, in the aftermath of former President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Wednesday, he opened fire on two National Guardsmen just blocks from the White House, killing one, Sarah Beckstrom and leaving the other, Andrew Wolfe, fighting for his life with critical injuries.

Trump, a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan failures, quickly promised to “fix” the problems created when Biden allowed “hundreds of thousands of people” to come into the United States from Afghanistan, “totally unvetted and unchecked.”

The president also vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and said that he planned to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Rather than cover the story straight or report on the risk that Biden’s refugee policies pose to American citizens, the Associated Press telegraphed concern for Afghan refugees in the United States.

“Trump administration plan to review Biden-era refugees sparks worry and uncertainty,” one AP headline read.

The Trump administration’s plan to review all refugees admitted to the United States under the Biden administration is weighing heavily on people who could be affected by the evaluation, fueling uncertainty and worry among people who believed their status was secured.

Another headline reported that “Refugee groups worry about backlash after shooting of National Guard soldiers in DC.”

Many Afghans living in the U.S. are afraid to leave their houses, fearing they’ll be swept up by immigration officials or attacked with hate speech, said Shawn VanDiver, president of the San Diego-based group #AfghanEvac, a group that helps resettle Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the two-decade war.

“They’re terrified. It’s insane,” VanDiver told The Associated Press Thursday. “People are acting xenophobic because of one deranged man. He doesn’t represent all Afghans. He represents himself.”

Yet another piece suggested that Trump was in the wrong for criticizing the Biden administration for bringing unvetted Afghans into the United States in the first place. “Trump criticizes the program that brought Afghan refugees to the US who fought the Taliban,” it read.

The program, called Operation Allies Welcome, was created after the 2021 decision to leave Afghanistan following 20 years of American intervention and billions of dollars of aid.

Democratic President Joe Biden, who oversaw the withdrawal started by his predecessor — Republican President Donald Trump — said the U.S. owed it to the interpreters and translators, the fighters and drivers and others who opposed the Taliban to give them a safe place outside of Afghanistan.

The New York Times was slightly more overt in its adoption of the “Trump pounces” theme, with one headline asserting “Trump Uses National Guard Shooting to Cast Suspicion on Refugees.”

President Trump claimed there were “a lot of problems with Afghans,” without providing evidence, as his administration announced that it was implementing new immigration guidelines.

But as those outlets and others have chosen to ignore, Army Ranger veteran and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell warned the Biden administration in real time, telling anyone who would listen that bringing unvetted Afghans into the United States was a recipe for disaster.

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At the time, he told the story of an Afghan interpreter who had been working with his platoon for more than a year before betraying them, putting them on a path where a land mine injured several and killed one of Parnell’s men.

“After that mission was over, during our After Action Report (AAR), we found out that our interpreter — who had been with us every step of the way, someone who we thought was our friend — we learned that he was working with an Iranian IED cell in Pakistan, and coordinated the placement of that mine,” Parnell explained.

But Parnell’s warning fell on deaf ears. Just one day before the deadly shooting cast a pall over a nation preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving, another Afghan national was arrested for making a terroristic threat” and posting it on TikTok.

Fox News national correspondent Brooke Taylor reported that Mohammad Dawood Alokozay made it clear in the video that he was building a bomb and had intended to target the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Like the shooting suspect in custody in D.C., Alokozay was brought into the United States in the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome. He was granted legal permanent resident status in September 2022.

The 2026 midterms are about as high-stakes as elections can be.

Thirty-five Senate seats are up for grabs next November, as are all 435 House seats. Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both houses of Congress — one that could get even slimmer with the coming resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene. The results of the elections could shape the final two years of President Donald Trump’s time in the White House. The midterms will also loom over the 2028 presidential election, particularly for Democrats, who do not have an obvious candidate waiting in the wings.

We’re still a ways out, but many of the most crucial races are already heating up. Here are five races to keep an eye on.

Texas

The cycle’s most heated election began months ago when Trump ally and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a challenge to longtime Sen. John Cornyn.

Paxton has argued that Cornyn is too establishment to continue representing the state, saying that “Cornyn’s Swamp friends are spending tens of millions of dollars to attack me.” Cornyn in turn has called Paxton a “conman and a fraud,” the Associated Press reported earlier this year.

The winner of that primary will face off against either Colin Allred, a former congressman, or State Rep. James Talarico, who made national headlines in 2021 when he and a group of Democrat colleagues fled Texas to prevent the state legislature from voting on bills they opposed. More recently, Talarico — who has pitched himself as a Christian Democrat — came under fire after it was revealed that he followed a number of OnlyFans models on Instagram.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose radical outbursts are almost too numerous to mention, is also weighing entering the race — which has Republicans thrilled.

Maine

Like John Cornyn, Susan Collins has caught plenty of flak from her fellow Republicans in recent years. But the moderate senator’s main concern as she runs for a fifth term comes from Democrats, not a primary challenger.

Maine Governor Janet Mills lost an early lead to populist upstart Graham Platner — though the oyster farmer blew an early lead with a series of scandals, including resurfaced Reddit posts in which he slammed cops and called himself a “communist,” and the revelation that he had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest.

Platner has been bleeding staff in the wake of these revelations, including his campaign manager, political director, and national finance manager.

Despite all this, Platner still seems to be the Democrat to beat — though a recent poll found that voters favor Collins the more they learn about Platner.

Michigan

In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed are seeing who can run furthest to the Left.

McMorrow recently held a fundraiser with a leftist blogger who mocked Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Stevens, who endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), once screamed at her constituents for supporting the Second Amendment. And El-Sayed, who’s backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), blamed Israel for “invading” Gaza in October 2023, failing to mention that the “invasion” in question was a military response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.

Whichever Democrat emerges victorious from the fray will face off against Mike Rogers, a Trump-endorsed former congressman who lost his 2024 Senate race by a tiny margin.

Ohio

Rogers isn’t the only lawmaker staging a political comeback in 2026. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown — a longtime leftist fixture in the Upper Chamber who fell last year to Republican Bernie Moreno — is running against Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who was tapped to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat.

Brown was dogged with allegations of hypocrisy throughout his time in the Senate, something The Daily Wire frequently covered. The leftist was slammed for taking donations from drug companies at the center of the opioid crisis and attending a ritzy Hollywood fundraiser while constituents worried about the water quality at their home after the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine.

California

Of all the House seats up for grabs in 2026 — and, remember, that’s all of them — the most closely-watched is California, where Democrats are fighting to fill former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s soon-to-be-vacated seat.

Pelosi reportedly wants San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan to succeed her. But the candidate to beat is California State Senator Scott Wiener, a man so radical that even the New York Times has its doubts about him.

From radical trans activism to legalizing prostitution and pedophilia, there’s almost nothing Wiener doesn’t want the state to permit — unless of course parents don’t want their minor children to undergo radical gender procedures, in which case he thinks the state should be able to take custody of those children.

Wiener’s record is almost too insane to believe, but The Daily Wire recently published the definitive account of this wannabe congressman. Give it a read here.

Georgia

Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff will be defending his seat against a Republican challenger yet to be determined. The current frontrunners are Reps. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley, and former University of Tennessee football coach Buddy Carter.

The race is expected to be extraordinarily expensive, as Ossoff already has $21 million in cash on hand, according to Federal Election Commission data. Although it’s unclear who the nominee on the Republican side will be, millions are already pouring in for the individual candidates at this stage, The Daily Wire reported in October.

Ossoff most recently made waves for his vote against reopening the government, a vote that Republicans will likely lord over him throughout the cycle.

But Wait, There’s More…

North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is set to square off against Republican Michael Whatley. Former Senators John Sununu and Scott Brown are duking it out in a New Hampshire primary. Redistricting battles are sure to make house races spicy in Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, and more. And just for fun, the weirdest scion of the Kennedy family is running alongside about a dozen other Democrats to represent a district in the heart of Zohran Mamdani’s Manhattan.

It’s going to be a heck of a cycle. Stick with The Daily Wire, we’ll be covering it all!