President-elect Donald Trump rang in the new year in familiar fashion — using a news event to bolster his case for tougher enforcement of the country's southern border, a change he says is crucial to stemming the flood of violent criminals to prevent them from entering the USA
After a pickup truck driver mowed down dozens of people in New Orleans in the first hours of Jan. 1, killing 15, Trump quickly released a statement suggesting the perpetrator had entered the country illegally.
He did not correct this claim and even aggravated it Rhetoric against the “open border” with Mexico after it quickly became clear that an initial news report portraying the attacker as an immigrant was false.
The driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was identified as an American who grew up in Beaumont, Texas, served in the U.S. Army and was acting alone when he drove into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street, according to authorities. The FBI said Jabbar was inspired by the Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim extremist group that was behind several terrorist attacks over more than a decade.
Analysts tracking his public statements have seen Trump's rhetoric and verbal volleys follow a familiar pattern – combining exaggerations and false claims to bolster his campaign against illegal immigration, a cause he and his most ardent supporters say is crucial to America's security .
“This is his way of previewing what he has been betting on since his first race in 2016 — that he will take extreme measures to defend the border,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communications and journalism at Texas A&M University. “He gives himself a permission structure based on these threats that he claims are not just imagined but have now become reality. And he uses that to say, “Things are about to get very extreme.”
Trump described recent immigrants as “far worse” criminals than those already living in America. This attitude amounts to “rhetorical ammunition to provide the reasons with which he advocates doing what he wants to do anyway,” said Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”
A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Two Trump presidential campaign advisers also did not respond.
Fox News first reported Wednesday morning that the rental truck used in the New Orleans attack had crossed the border into Mexico just two days before the Bourbon Street carnage.
Minutes later, Trump made his first statement about the attack. “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly debunked by Democrats and the fake news media, but it turned out to be true,” the statement reads in part. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that no one has ever seen before.”
Donald J. Trump Jr. quickly posted on social media platform
Not long after, Fox News, along with other media outlets, reported that the truck attack was carried out by an American citizen, Jabbar, and not an immigrant. This correction did little to temper Trump's impassioned rhetoric.
“Our country is a disaster, a laughingstock around the world!” wrote the new president on Wednesday evening on X. “This is what happens when there are OPEN BORDERS with weak, ineffective and virtually non-existent leadership.”
In what may have been a concession to the new information about Jabbar's status as an American rather than an immigrant, Trump accused law enforcement of failing to protect Americans from “violent scum from without and within.”
Statements from Trump and his supporters after the attack focused on Jabbar's “otherness” and added disdain for the media and others who noted that Jabbar was an American citizen, he said Robert Rowland, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.
“In Trump’s eyes, this person, despite being an American citizen, appears to reject Christianity and the military and turn away from the things that make him un-American,” Rowland said.
A photo released by the FBI shows Shamsud-Din Jabbar an hour before he drove a truck down Bourbon Street.
(FBI via Associated Press)
Many of Trump's core supporters are working-class people who have expressed a pronounced discomfort with the country's changing demographics, with newcomers perceived as different from those who arrived before them, said Rowland, author of “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”
“There is extreme unease about the pace of social and cultural change,” Rowland said. “And the core group that has that sense is broadly the working class and particularly the white working class.”
One user of “Phew,” the X critic wrote, “because we would all hate to think that a non-citizen or an illegal immigrant could ever harm innocent people.”
Trump and his team have not hesitated to incite fear of immigrants in the past.
In his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump repeated a claim — thoroughly debunked by multiple individuals and government officials — that Haitian migrants ate dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
The Republican presidential nominee has never backed down from that claim. And his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, soon said that “first-hand accounts of my constituents” gave him reason enough to repeat the claim.
Although the pet-eating stories have not been confirmed, Vance said they have drawn attention to the problem of U.S. communities being flooded with migrants. (The Haitians around Springfield traveled there legally, authorities said.)
“The American media completely ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” Vance said in an interview with CNN. “If I have to make up stories so that the American media will actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then I will.”
Statements about dangerous immigrants are all part of a “very blatant political calculation” aimed at making them “objects of hate so that they can then be attacked and marginalized,” Mercieca said. She acknowledged that “other people might read Republicans’ intentions more charitably.”
Republicans did not hesitate to amplify Trump's words and say they justify a crackdown on immigration. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) protested on Fox News on New Year's Day against the “open border” and “the idea that dangerous people are coming here in droves and setting up potential terrorist cells across the country.”
Johnson, who was re-elected speaker on Friday, hinted that the House could try to re-introduce a bill similar to the one it passed in 2023. That bill — which was rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate — would have extended the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. reinstated the policy of detaining migrant asylum seekers either in Mexico or in detention centers in that country and accelerated the deportation of unaccompanied children.
One day after the attack, Trump refocused its social media attack on “radical Islamic terrorism” and said that it and “other forms of violent crime in America are becoming so bad that it is difficult to imagine or believe.” That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
During his campaign, he proposed reinstating a controversial travel ban on five Muslim-majority countries. The plan was changed after legal challenges. But Trump defended it on national security grounds and said he would now use it to exclude refugees from the war in Gaza.
“Many of us hoped that he would act as president rather than continue to exploit a tragedy to divide Americans and advance his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant agenda,” said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Greater Los Angeles Office.
“He is stoking bigotry, stoking anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment,” Ayloush said, “which, as we have seen time and time again, leads to violent attacks on people perceived to be Muslim and immigrants.”
Stephen Miller, Trump's senior adviser, argued that the law was related to migration.
“Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not “native.” ” Miller posted after the attack on X. “It did not exist here before migration brought it here.”