President-elect Trump on Thursday suggested “radical Islamic terrorism” and President Biden’s “open borders” were to blame for the deadly New Orleans truck attack, even though the suspect was an American-born military veteran.
Although he did not specifically name the New Orleans killings of 14 New Year’s revelers, Trump left little doubt that he was referring to the attack allegedly carried out by a Texas man who had pledged allegiance to the radical Islamic State terror group.
“I said many times … that radical Islamic terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
Trump went on to point the finger at President Biden, whom he derided as a “complete and total disaster,” and Biden’s supposed “open border policy.”
It wasn’t clear what connection Trump was trying to make between the New Orleans attack and the border or immigration.
Suspected attacker Shamsud Din Jabbar, who was killed in a shootout with police, was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, and was not an immigrant.
Jabbar, 42, served in the Army on active duty from 2006 to 2015, then in the Army Reserve from 2015 to 2020, according to officials. He served in Afghanistan.
He lived in Houston and had worked for the consulting giant Deloitte since 2021.
Jabbar spoke about family troubles and declared allegiance to ISIS in a series of videos recorded while driving from Houston to New Orleans to carry out the attack.
He allegedly intentionally rammed a rented pickup into revelers around 3:15 a.m. on Bourbon Street in the Big Easy’s famed French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring at least 35 others. Two police officers were wounded in the shootout that followed.
Although Jabbar is now believed to have carried out the New Orleans attack alone, officials are still probing whether there could be any link between his attack and the apparent suicide car bomb that exploded outside a Trump-branded Las Vegas hotel a few hours later.
Matthew Livelsberger, a highly decorated active-duty Army soldier from Colorado Springs, allegedly detonated a rented Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives on New Year’s Day after apparently shooting himself in the head. Damage from the blast was mostly limited to the inside of the truck and no one else was seriously wounded.
Livelsberger, 37, who was on leave from the Army, was also born in the U.S. No motive for the Cybertruck attack had been identified as of Thursday.
While officials say they don’t know of any link between the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks, both suspects rented the vehicles they used on Turo, a vehicle-sharing app. They also both served at the Fort Liberty military base in North Carolina, though officials who spoke to the Associated Press said there was no overlap in their assignments at the base.
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