While some leaders respond to terrorist attacks and other tragic events by urging calm, Donald Trump tends to use such events to claim vindication.
In 2016, after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida, Trump used the infamous phrase “appreciate the congrats,” after the perpetrator was found to be Muslim.
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!,” then-candidate Trump said on Twitter at the time. About six months before that, Trump first proposed his “Muslim ban” in response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack in late 2015, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” As president, Trump ordered travel cut off from the majority-Muslim countries Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Following the attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, in which 15 people were killed by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS, Trump was back to his old tricks in a lengthy Truth Social post.
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“Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership,” Trump declared. “The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government.”
He went on to declare, separately, that “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
Also on Truth Social, Trump was back Thursday morning with another post, this time blaming the “Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy'” [sic] for the attack, going on to call Biden the “WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”
However, Trump was a bit off this time in his prescription. That’s because the suspect in the case, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was not a migrant or an immigrant, but a U.S. citizen, who was born in Texas. “Open borders” have nothing to do with his presence in the country. Nor would any version of the Trump “Muslim ban” have prevented the attack, since it wouldn’t have gotten a Texas-born U.S. citizen deported or prevented from entering the country. Trump has not proposed kicking Muslims who are American citizens out of the country based on their religion, and no such policy would likely ever meet Constitutional muster.
There had been a Fox News report that the truck used in the New Orleans attack had crossed the Mexican border two days earlier, but that report was retracted quickly.
As for the individual who has been named as a suspect in this week’s other attack, in which a Cybertruck blew up outside Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas, he is also not an immigrant, but an active duty Army member from Colorado. The suspect, Matthew Livelsberger, rented his truck from the same app that the New Orleans suspect used, although it’s not clear if that’s more than a coincidence. Both men also served as the military base formerly known as Fort Bragg, although they were not there at the same time.
Photo courtesy of Political Tribune photo library.
