In the hours after a mass murderer killed 10 people in New Orleans with a combination car and gun attack only hours into the new year, there was much that was unknown about the killer, his motive(s) or potential co-conspirators. However, one thing was as certain as the sun rising in the east: Donald Trump would take to Truth Social to lie about it, pumping as much disinformation as possible into the discourse before the facts had a chance to percolate. Wednesday morning, at least an hour before the name of the suspect was even publicly released, Trump sure enough was lying about it on his social media website.
“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,” he ranted. It did not turn out to be true.
The reported gunman, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was born in the U.S., worked in IT for the Army and graduated from Georgia State University. Indeed, but for his race and his name, he has a profile that resembles your typical MAGA troublemaker who gravitates toward radical groups like the Proud Boys or the Oathkeepers: past arrest for drunk driving, two failed marriages, a restraining order against him, and serious financial troubles, despite making $120,000 a year at a prestigious accounting firm.
Trump’s followers receive his lies as an intoxicating promise: that they, too, can be released from the duty to be honest.
Trump’s lie was so outrageous that even Fox News reluctantly pointed out that Jabbar, who was killed by police during the attack, was a U.S. citizen. But, of course, Trump would not admit he was wrong.
“This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS,” he raved on Truth Social in the middle of the night Wednesday. He continued the lie again Thursday morning, blaming “the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy'” for “Radical Islamic Terrorism.”
President Joe Biden doesn’t have an “open borders” policy, grammatically written or otherwise, and even if he did, it would not have mattered here, because Jabbar was born in Texas. Still, Republicans saw Trump’s doubling down for what it was: a signal that they are expected to repeat and defend the outrageous lie, using sheer force of repetition to drown out the truth.
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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., a self-described devoted Christian, ran toward the cameras to violate the biblical commandment forbidding false testimony. Responding to the New Orleans attack on Fox News, Johnson blamed “the wide open border” and sneered, “the Biden administration has been completely derelict in its duty” to deal with the “dangerous people” coming into the country and “setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country.”
Speaker Mike Johnson on Fox & Friends suggests Biden’s “wide open border” played a role in the New Orleans attack. Again, the perpetrator was born in Texas and served in the US military.
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 2, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Shortly thereafter, the FBI confirmed that the native-born citizen behind the New Orleans attack worked alone. Law enforcement revealed, as well, that the driver of a Cybertruck that exploded in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on Jan. 1 was a native-born soldier in the Army. The deceased suspect, Matthew Livelsberger, was white, a member of the Green Berets and reportedly “loved Trump.”
Facts did not matter. The order had been implicitly given and Republicans are pretending this is “foreign” terrorism. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., complained about arrests of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, saying the FBI should focus instead on “terrorists who want to kill Americans.” The two alleged New Year’s Day attackers are no different in profile from the Jan. 6 defendants, who are also native-born Americans who attacked other Americans. Yet Republican policy adviser Neil Chatterjee went on CNN and insisted that the New Orleans attack is connected with “securing the border.” Republican Rep. Randy Weber, who represents a district near Jabbar’s home, nonetheless pretended on Fox Business that the blame lay with “special interest aliens” sneaking in from Mexico from “Iran, Iraq, Syria, you can go down the list.”
MAGA behaves like a cult, where everyone parrots the leader’s latest order to only wear green shirts, even though last week he was saying green shirts were forbidden. As in a cult, the willingness to repeat lies is a show of loyalty to the leader, proving his power over his followers and strengthening it by further disconnecting them from reality. The supplicants typically believe they are empowered by shamelessly lying. Just look at Johnson’s ever-present smirk. Trump’s followers receive his lies as an intoxicating promise: that they, too, can be released from the duty to be honest. That they, too, can claim reality is whatever they want it to be, and relish how much it “triggers” the liberals to keep insisting on a lie in the face of countervailing evidence.
For GOP leaders, there are rewards in being disinformation parrots, as evidenced by Johnson securing his speakership with a Trump endorsement this week. But that example also shows the dangers. Johnson’s power is largely an illusion, dependent entirely on the mercurial whims of his master. If Trump decides tomorrow that he’s displeased with Johnson’s supplication, he can call for the end of Johnson’s career, and congressional Republicans will immediately throw the speaker out.
The power is even more of a delusion when it comes to the everyday MAGA people who repeat Trump’s lies. It may feel exciting, to deny realities they don’t like. But all too often, reality has a way of asserting itself on ordinary people. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Empowered by Trump’s non-stop drumbeat of lies and disinformation — such as calling the pandemic a “hoax” or falsely suggesting it could be cured with bleach or sunlight — millions of Republicans refused to protect themselves against the virus. They eschewed social distancing and masks, and when the time came, they also rejected vaccines. The result was that red areas saw higher death rates than blue areas.
It’s easy to see a similar situation playing out here. If Trump is successful at using the lies about New Orleans to drum up political support for his mass deportation, the likely result will be a return to high levels of inflation. Trump won in no small part with false claims he could bring the price of groceries down. He can’t do that, but if he is able to deport scores of farm workers, crops will rot in fields, food supply will diminish, and prices will rise.
Not that it will matter for the MAGA diehards, of course. As we saw during the pandemic, they operate by cult logic. No matter how many friends and family members got terribly sick or died from COVID, what mattered more was affirming Trump’s lies. Loyalty to Trump matters more, and the way to prove loyalty is to repeat his lies. It’s a pattern we will see play out over and over for the next four years, no matter how dire the consequences.
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