No, Trump wasn't "confused" about the New Orleans attack
We're way past giving him the benefit of the doubt.
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On New Year’s Day, a driver intentionally steered a truck into a crowd in New Orleans, killing 14 people. Trump and other MAGA leaders, echoing a false Fox News report, quickly rushed to blame President Biden’s supposedly lax security at the border.
“The suspect drove a truck with a Texas license plate that came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago,” a Fox News anchor said, with the report going on to suggest that the suspect may have been an undocumented immigrant. (Watch below — video via the excellent Julet Jeske of Decoding Fox News.)
Trump got into the act on Truth Social, posting minutes after Fox’s erroneous report aired that “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.”
There was only one problem. The suspect in the attack, a 42-year-old Texas resident named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is not an immigrant. He was a US citizen and army veteran.
Fox quickly walked back its faulty reporting, but not before it became a story in itself. CNN’s piece about how Fox got it wrong explained Trump spreading false information by suggesting he was “confused” by what he saw on TV.
But that framing gives way too much benefit of the doubt to one of the world’s leading liars and purveyors of disinformation.
It’s bad enough to have a president-elect rushing to spread misinformation based on the shoddy reporting of a propaganda network. But what’s worse is that Trump was not just confused or misinformed. He spread the lie that the attacker was an immigrant because it confirms his priors and advances his political goals. He wants to harm immigrants and smearing them as violent criminals is a way to build support for massive human rights violations.
Stigmatizing marginalized people as criminals has been a core tactic to build fascist power in the past, and stigmatizing migrants as criminals has been a core tactic for MAGA. Sometimes demagogues like Trump will highlight real instances of crime, but often they just make things up.
Either way, the strategy is part of a larger false narrative — that narrative being that some group is particularly prone to violence and criminality, and that the safety of the majority requires them to be targeted, imprisoned, or exterminated.
MAGA isn’t confused. They are liars.
MAGA in general, and Trump in particular, make little pretense of caring about facts when there’s a bigoted narrative to pursue. The eagerness with which Republicans (falsely) bellowed that the attacker was an immigrant was grotesque, indecent, and shameless.
Trump’s sycophants hurried to cosign the lies he spread on Truth Social. Donald Trump Jr. said that the attack was Biden’s fault for opening the border to “migrant terrorists.” Marjorie Taylor Greene demanded, “Shut the border down!!!”
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In an ironic twist, Fox ended up correcting Trump over his Truth Social post, with an anchor saying on air that “the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in his statement, meaning into our country. But to be clear, the suspect was born in the United States. He served in the United States Army. He was a veteran.” But Republican lawmakers and talking heads have continued to link the attack to immigration, even though (again) it was quickly determined that the suspect is an American citizen.
After Fox’s correction, for example, Trump again posted, “this is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS.” Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt wailed, “Has the enemy already infiltrated our borders?” — even though he could have turned on the television and heard from even his beloved Fox that the answer was “no.” Similarly, Speaker Mike Johnson popped up on Fox & Friends to suggest that the attack was connected to the “wide open border” — ignoring the fact that the border is not wide open and that the attacker had already been identified as an American national and Army veteran. (Watch below and note that Johnson continued to push the same talking point during his appearance yesterday on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday show.)
The ugly truth is that Trump and MAGA wanted the attacker to be an immigrant, and now that they know he isn’t, they’re shameless enough to just to forge ahead with pretending that he is.
They are not confused or misinformed. They are pushing a smear campaign, in the ugly tradition of far-right smear merchants of the past.
The tradition of Jim Crow and the Nazis
There is a long history of far-right leaders and movements claiming that marginalized people are violent criminals as a prelude to brutalizing them.
Following the abolition of slavery, for example, white supremacists in the South (and not just in the South) claimed that “Black people were reverting to criminal savagery,” as the Jim Crow Museum explains. The manufactured fear that Black men were raping white women became an excuse for and a justification of lynching and mob murders of Black men.
The Nazis used similar tactics. Nazi propaganda like Der Stürmer and the film “The Eternal Jew” claimed that Jewish men were responsible for worldwide prostitution and pushed medieval canards about Jews murdering Christian children. The Nazis also loved to charge individual Jews for crimes like tax fraud in high profile cases which they could then point to and claim that all Jews were innately criminal (even though non-Jews, when prosecuted, were not held up as examples of Aryan criminality).
Over the last decade, Trump has exploited anti-immigrant propaganda that is very much in the spirit of Jim Crow and the Nazis. He has repeatedly and relentlessly claimed that immigrants are dangerous and violent, even though he has had every opportunity to learn that immigrants commit fewer crimes than US-born Americans.
It’s impossible to list every example of Trump lying about immigrants in this way. But just a sampling makes the point.
In his campaign launch speech in June 2015, Trump smeared Mexican immigrants, claiming “they're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.” Before the 2018 midterms, Trump claimed that there was a dangerous wave of migrants coming into the US who he referred to as “stone cold criminals.” (His rhetoric about an “invasion” of the country echoes conspiracy theories that have inspired numerous rightwing mass shooters.) And during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the psychopathic cannibalistic serial killer in the film “Silence of the Lambs.” (Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that insane asylums and political asylum are different things.)
The lies are a feature, not a bug
Just as the Nazis would sometimes highlight instances of Jewish people who had actually committed crimes, Trump will sometimes turn his focus to real instances of violence — as in the case of Venezuelan migrant Jose Ibarra, who was convicted of murdering Georgia student Laken Riley. At other times, Trump will just make up or cosign bigoted lies — as when he claimed that Haitian migrants in Ohio were stealing and eating people’s pets. (They were not doing that.)
Fact-checking each individual claim isn’t really the point, though. Trump does not care if what he says about a particular crime, or a particular immigrant, is true. He doesn’t even care if it makes any sense, as his bizarre and barely coherent riffs on Hannibal Lecter demonstrate. Indeed, just hours after he spread lies about the New Orleans attack on Truth Social, Trump repeatedly posted that he’s been “RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
When Trump and his MAGA minions say that the New Orleans murders were perpetrated by an immigrant, they aren’t confused, nor are they misinformed. They are indifferent to the truth. They believe that demonizing immigrants is to their advantage, and they intend to demonize immigrants no matter what.
Trump’s goal is to get the media to repeatedly, obsessively, link immigrants to crime. He wants people to believe that immigrants as a group are dangerous criminals. He may try to get them to believe that by highlighting crimes by immigrants (while downplaying crimes by his supporters). He may do it by claiming that some group of immigrants committed crimes when they did not. He may do it by pointing to a crime like the New Orleans attack and pretending that it was the fault of immigrants. But whatever his tactic, the goal is the same — to spread hate, to prepare the ground for massive human rights atrocities, and to build authoritarian power.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
I think there is another piece to it, which is Trump has his own idea of who is a citizen. Anyone who is not White is not a citizen in his mind, in his make-believe world that he is trying to turn into the "truth." That is the problem. His idea is that 1) all non-White people are immigrants. In fact, he has such strange understanding of immigrants, that his wife does not appear to be an immigrant based on what he has to say about immigrants, nor his in-laws, nor his ex-wife. Yet, a man born and raised in the US, who has Brown skin is an immigrant. That is a made up concept of immigrant, but is akin to the way that Hitler conceived Jews. So, in that sense, Trump is confused, because he wants to make words fit his concepts instead of fitting his concepts to the meanings of words.
This post is hard to like, but you’re right about everything Noah. Trump is indeed a fascist , repeating Nazi Germany tactics