The Memo: New Orleans mass killing gets pulled into partisan political battle
It took less than 48 hours for the mass killing in New Orleans to be pulled into the partisan debates that are roiling the nation.
In the process, some of the political rhetoric ran roughshod over the facts.
President-elect Trump, for example, quickly took to social media to imply that lax immigration policies were responsible for the carnage on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street, where a man in a rented truck mowed down revelers at around 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday, killing 14 people.
“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump contended.
Trump may have been basing that assessment in part upon early reports that the suspect had driven the vehicle in question across the southern border this week. Those reports were wrong.
More to the point, the suspect, who was killed in a shootout with police, was a U.S. citizen who had been raised in Beaumont, Texas.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was a U.S. Army veteran who had joined up in 2007 and had been deployed to Afghanistan around 2009, though he is not believed to have seen direct conflict. He later transferred to the Army Reserve, in which he served until 2020.
Trump, characteristically, did not back down from his original point even when contrary facts became known. In a Thursday morning social media post, he contended that President Biden’s "open border policy" had set the stage for an explosion of “Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime.”
Trump adviser Stephen Miller offered a different rationale for how immigration policy could be to blame for a mass murder apparently committed by a Texan.
Miller, a noted immigration hardliner who will be homeland security adviser in the incoming Trump administration, wrote on social media that “Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not ‘homegrown’. It did not exist here before migration brought it here.”
Jabbar is believed to have expressed support for the Islamic State (IS) in videos he posted to his Facebook account shortly before the mass killing. The FBI has said that an IS flag was found in the vehicle. The FBI also stated that weapons and a potential improvised explosive device were discovered.
Attacks in the American homeland by those harboring radical Islamist sympathies have happened sporadically, with grisly results, for years — though the extent to which they can be attributed to any specific U.S. president or policy is far more questionable.
In 2009, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas, having apparently become increasingly radicalized over several years.
In 2015, a husband and wife in San Bernardino, Calif., killed 14 people. James Comey, then the FBI director, described them as “homegrown violent extremists.”
And in June 2016, gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Mateen had declared an allegiance to IS and expressed revulsion of Western lifestyles he considered decadent. The Pulse nightclub catered primarily to an LGBT crowd.
This week’s New Orleans mass killing was followed within hours by the explosion of a Tesla cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. The driver of the vehicle is believed to have shot himself in the head shortly before detonating the vehicle.
He has been identified as Matthew Livelsberger, a highly decorated Green Beret, who was on approved leave at the time. Much else about the incident remains shrouded in uncertainty.
Republicans beyond Trump have sought to connect the events in New Orleans, in particular, with what they see as a lack of leadership from Biden.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who faces a difficult battle to retain the gavel in a vote expected Friday, told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Thursday that he “cannot wait” for Trump to take office on Jan. 20 because the president-elect will be “restoring real law and order in this country.”
Johnson further contended that the Biden administration had been “derelict in its duty” and that there was “obvious concern about terrorism and the wide open border.”
On the same show, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) called for Trump’s controversial nominees to national security-related posts to be quickly confirmed because “this is a moment in transition of vulnerability” and called Trump “a leader of strength.”
Few people believe that it is possible to create a situation where the U.S. is somehow immune from acts of domestic terrorism, under Trump or any other president, however. In the event that some tragedy takes place under his watch, the promise of strength could seem exaggerated.
In the meantime, Democrats are jabbing back at GOP claims over the New Orleans atrocity. Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) told CNN on Thursday it was “unfortunate that both the president-elect and Speaker Johnson has chosen to make this a partisan issue.”
But it also seems likely that Trump and his allies will use the attack to press the case against Biden — and to perhaps open the door to more aggressive use of immigration and law enforcement powers once the former president is back in office.
“The USA is breaking down - A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation,” Trump asserted on social media moments past midnight on Thursday.
“The CIA must get involved NOW before it is too late,” Trump wrote.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.