President-elect Donald Trump ushered in the New Year in familiar fashion — using a news event in an attempt to build his case for tougher enforcement of the nation’s southern border, a change he said is crucial to stop violent criminals from flooding into the U.S.
After a pickup truck driver mowed down dozens of people in New Orleans, killing 14, in the first hours of Jan. 1, Trump quickly issued a statement that implied the perpetrator had come into the country illegally.
He did not correct that assertion, and even escalated his rhetoric against the “open border” with Mexico, after it soon became clear that an initial news report that depicted the attacker as an immigrant was wrong.
The driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, has been identified as an American raised in Beaumont, Texas, who served in the U.S. Army and who authorities said acted alone when he drove into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street. The FBI said Jabbar was inspired by the Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim extremist group behind multiple terrorist acts over more than a decade.
Trump’s rhetoric and verbal salvos followed a familiar pattern, according to analysts who track his public pronouncements — combining hyperbole and false assertions to bolster his campaign against illegal immigration, a cause that he and his most ardent followers depict as crucial to America’s security.
“This is his way of previewing what he’s been running on since his first race in 2016 — that he’s going to take extreme measures to defend the border,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University. “He’s giving himself a permission structure based on these threats, which he is suggesting are not just imaginary but have now come to pass. And he’s using that as a way of saying, ‘Things are about to become very extreme.’ “
Trump described recent immigrants as criminals “far worse” than those already living in America. That stance amounts to “rhetorical ammunition, to provide the grounds by which he makes a case for doing what he wants to do anyway,” said Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”
A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Two advisers to Trump’s presidential campaigns also did not respond.
Fox News initially reported on Wednesday morning that the rental truck used in the New Orleans attack had crossed the border with Mexico just two days prior to the Bourbon Street carnage.
Minutes later, Trump issued his first statement on 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 refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” the statement read, in part. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”
Donald J. Trump Jr. quickly posted on the social media platform X: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted: “Shut the border down!!!”
Not long afterward, Fox News joined other outlets in reporting that truck attack had been launched by an American citizen, Jabbar, not an immigrant. That correction did little to temper Trump’s fervent rhetoric.
“Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” the incoming president wrote on X Wednesday night. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”
In what may have been one concession to the new information about Jabbar’s status as an American, not an immigrant, Trump went on to fault law enforcement for not not protecting Americans from “outside and inside violent SCUM.”
Statements by Trump and his followers in the aftermath of the attack focused on the Jabbar’s “otherness” and added disdain for the media and others who noted that Jabbar was an American citizen, said Robert Rowland, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.
“In Trump’s mind, although that person is an American citizen, he seems to reject Christianity and to reject the military, and in turning away from those things that makes him un-American,” Rowland said.
Many of Trump’s core followers are working-class people who have expressed a pronounced unease with demographic shifts in the country, with newcomers perceived to be unlike those who arrived before them, said Rowland, author of “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”
“There is an extreme discomfort with the pace of social and cultural change,” Rowland said. “And the core group that has that sense is, broadly speaking, the working class and, specifically, the white working class.”
One X user sounded agitated when mainstream news outlets reported that Jabbar was an American citizen, suggesting the media recoiled from naming the true threats to the country. “Phew,” wrote the X critic, “because we all would hate to think a non-citizen, or an illegal immigrant, could ever harm innocent people.”
Trump and his team have not hesitated in the past to stoke fear about immigrants.
In his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump repeated a claim — thoroughly debunked by multiple individuals and government officials — that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
The Republican presidential candidate never backtracked on that claim. And his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, soon suggested that “first-hand accounts of my constituents” gave him reason enough to repeat the assertion.
Although the pet-eating stories had not been verified, Vance said they brought attention to the issue of U.S. communities being overwhelmed with migrants. (The Haitians around Springfield went there legally, authorities said.)
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance said in an interview with CNN. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Statements about dangerous immigrants are all part of a “very crass political calculation” designed to turn them into “hate objects so they can then be attacked and ostracized,” Mercieca said. She acknowledged that “other people might have a more charitable read” on the Republicans’ intentions.
Republicans did not hesitate to amplify Trump’s words and to say they justified an immigration crackdown. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) went on Fox News on New Year’s Day to protest the “wide-open border,” and “the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potential terrorist cells around the country.”
Johnson, reelected speaker on Friday, suggested that the House might try to again raise a bill similar to the one it approved in 2023. That legislation — killed by the Democratic-controlled Senate — would have extended the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, reimposed a policy of keeping migrant asylum-seekers either in Mexico or in detention facilities in that country and sped up deportation of unaccompanied children.
A day after the attack, Trump refocused his social media attack on “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” saying that it and “other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
He suggested during his campaign that he would resurrect a controversial travel ban on five Muslim-majority nations. The plan was modified after facing legal challenges. But Trump defended it on national security grounds and said he would now use it to ban refugees from the war in Gaza.
“Many of us were hoping 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, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ office of Greater Los Angeles.
“He is fueling bigotry, fueling anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiment,” said Ayloush, “which we have seen again and again, lead to violent attacks on people presumed as Muslim and immigrant.”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, promoted the idea that the act was connected to migration.
“Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not ‘homegrown.’ ” Miller posted on X after the attack. “It did not exist here before migration brought it here.”
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