The New Year’s Attacks

Two separate terror attacks in the U.S. have 2025 off to a wrenching start.

The aftermath of the attack in New Orleans yesterday, courtesy of The New York Times

Celebrations turned to horror in New Orleans as the driver of a pickup truck plowed into a crowd of revelers in the French Quarter of the city in the early hours of New Year’s morning. A total of 15 people are dead and around three dozen injured, some very seriously.

The nation was just processing that attack when a Tesla cybertruck exploded outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas later that same morning. The vehicle’s trunk contained large firework mortars and gasoline and camp fuel canisters. The driver was killed and seven people in the blast zone were injured, thankfully none seriously.

Many Americans are understandably concerned about the threat of violence, terror and how the incoming Trump administration will handle such incidents. As I’ll discuss below, there are some important questions that remain unanswered about the attacks, and the response to them from the right is a disturbing preview of what we can expect.

Organized terror?

After a police shootout that killed the New Orleans attacker, identified as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, investigators found devices resembling homemade bombs in and near the truck and elsewhere in the area. This has understandably led to questions over whether Jabbar acted alone. [Update: Authorities now believe Jabbar did in fact act alone.]

Jabbar’s public statements also suggest that law enforcement should look further into whether he was a sole attacker or part of a group or cell. Hours earlier, he had posted videos to Facebook indicating he was inspired by the Islamic State, and investigators found an Islamic State sticker on the trailer hitch of the rented truck. By these acts, it’s clear Jabbar fully intended his allegiances to be known once he completed his attack.

“By carrying an ISIS flag with him during the attack, the suspect wanted to show that he was a true believer, aligned with the ISIS cause, and perhaps hoping to trigger others into following suit,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst interviewed by the Times.

The use of a vehicle as a weapon in this case resembles similar attacks carried out by extremists in other parts of the world. As the New York Times reported,

The attack was at least the third deadly incident where a vehicle was deliberately driven into a crowd in a little more than seven weeks, following the use of S.U.V.s to kill five people in Germany a few days before Christmas, and at least 35 people in southern China in November.

A terrorist that few suspected

We’re beginning to learn about Jabbar’s background, and it doesn’t seem to fit any easy patterns nor raise immediate red flags.

Contrary to initial right wing claims that he was a recent migrant, Jabbar was born in Texas and was raised as a Christian but converted to Islam long ago, according to his brother.

Jabbar served almost eight years in the army, deploying to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010. He became an Army Reservist after leaving active duty in January 2015, then left the reserves as a staff sergeant in July 2020. He received several awards including the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Good Conduct Medal, the Army Reserve Components Achievement Medal, the Army Achievement Medal and a National Defense Service Medal.

In a video from 2020, Jabbar spoke about his post-military career in real estate. In it, he notes he was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. “I’ve been here all my life, with the exception of traveling for the military,” he said. Jabbar adds he had worked in the armed forces as a human resources specialist and an information technology specialist.

A freelance Times reporter happened to have interviewed Jabbar back in 2015 for the Georgia State college paper. Jabbar told her that he had struggled to acclimate to civilian life, and that he was frustrated with having to navigate complex Veterans Administration benefits.

Jabbar has no history of violence, with just minor infractions from two decades ago: misdemeanor theft in 2002 and driving with an invalid license in 2005. At times, he was under significant financial pressure, writing in 2022 to his second wife, from whom he had separated, that he could not afford the latest house payment and that the bank might take it back.

Still, as of recently, Jabbar held a six figure job, and he had three children he saw on weekends, according to people who knew him. The Times noted that his family and colleagues saw him as a quiet, helpful brother and neighbor. There were no outward signs he would become a mass killer of innocents.

Jabbar’s brother believes he was radicalized before committing this terror act. He told the Times, “What he did does not represent Islam. This is more some type of radicalization, not religion.”

Dwayne Marsh, who is now married to Mr. Jabbar’s ex-wife, said that Jabbar had been acting erratically in recent months, “being all crazy, cutting his hair.” Marsh said he and his wife stopped allowing Jabbar to spend time with his two daughters whom she shared with him.

On Tuesday night, before the attacks, Jabbar posted videos, recorded while he was driving, to his Facebook page. They were addressed to his family, and in them he “pledged allegiance to ISIS.”

Jabbar joins a disturbing line of cases where army veterans from Texas have carried out mass killings. These include the 1966 clock tower killings at the University of Texas at Austin by a former Marine sniper that killed 15; an attack in 2009 when an Army major and psychiatrist killed 13 at Fort Hood; and an ambush in 2016 by an Army Reserve veteran who killed five police officers in Dallas.

The Tesla bomber suspect

Less is known about the perpetrator of the other attack. A local Denver news outlet, Denver7, reported that the suspect in the Las Vegas Tesla explosion is Matthew Livelsberger, who has multiple Colorado Springs addresses associated with him.

There are some unsettling coincidences between the two attacks that have police investigating whether there could be any connection between them.

Like Jabbar, Livelsberger was a former servicemember. According to a LinkedIn profile bearing his name and image, Livelsberger was a Special Forces Green Beret as well as an intelligence, operations and communications specialist.

Denver7 also reported that both men trained at the same army base, though there’s no evidence as yet that they knew each other. Curiously, and perhaps also only superficially coincidentally, both attackers also used the same rental car app, Turo, to obtain their vehicles.

Authorities have reviewed video footage of Livelsberger’s rented cybertruck, which he drove from Colorado to Las Vegas. After arriving in Las Vegas around 7:30 a.m. and after traveling back and forth along the Las Vegas strip, Livelsperger parked it at the front of the Trump hotel near the farthest exits. The explosion occurred around 8:40 a.m.

If Livelsberger’s intent was to cause maximum damage and carnage, he chose his method poorly. It was not a time of high foot traffic around the hotel lobby. And as someone experienced in field operations, Livelsberger should have known that a cybertruck, encased in stainless steel, would absorb much of the shock of the explosion, as it did in this case.

In short, it is certainly possible that the explosion did not occur as Livelsberger had intended, and further investigation is needed.

[Update: Las Vegas police now believe Livelsberger died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head prior to the explosion, adding to the mystery of what exactly happened.]

Politicization of the attacks

Right wing media, Donald Trump and other radical politicians immediately sought to exploit the New Orleans attack, insinuating falsely that Jabbar, a former Christian born and raised in Texas, was somehow a migrant who had recently arrived in the U.S.

The first culprit was Fox, which falsely reported that the vehicle driven by Jabbar had crossed the Southern border at Eagle Pass two days before the attack.

Fox has since corrected its reporting, but not before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) picked up on the misinformation and amplified it. She has not taken her post down.

Donald Trump also jumped in to insinuate that this attack was due to migrant crime. In typical Trump form, he talked first about criminals coming into the country, claimed falsely that the crime rates in the U.S. are at levels never seen when they have in fact fallen sharply, then went on about the New Orleans attack as if migrant crime and the attack itself were related, when they are not at all.

The Las Vegas attack is also coming under political scrutiny. After the identify of the Tesla cybertruck driver became known, MAGA loyalists leapt to portray Matthew Livelsberger as anti-Trump by (checks notes) accusing his wife of being a Trump hater. This was based primarily on (checks notes again) a Facebook comment from 2016.

Rather than give much oxygen to these absurd efforts, I note simply that it appears the two have been divorced for some time, that she is now remarried, and that Livelsberger’s politics aren’t clear but are being scrutinized to assess a possible motive.

[Update: A close family member of Livelsberger told The Independent that Livelsperger was “100 percent” a patriot who “loved Trump” and was a “Rambo type.”]

It’s simply too soon to know, if we ever really will, what Livelsberger’s true intent had been in loading up a Tesla cybertruck with explosives and driving it to Las Vegas in the early morning on New Year’s Day, and causing it to explode in front of the Trump hotel.

Image courtesy of The Washington Post

The symbolism is hard to miss, and that could simply be coincidence, or it could have been a deliberate effort to send a message. Many on the right, for example, are angry at both Trump and Musk for taking a pro-immigration position on the issue of H-1B visas and see it as a betrayal of America First principles.

One thing that remains abundantly clear from both attacks is that the FBI is going to be very busy trying to keep the nation safe from terrorists, including home-grown ones who acted this New Year’s Day. Given that reality, the last thing we need is for dysfunction and politicization of the Bureau under someone like Kash Patel to hinder or compromise the FBI’s ability to do its job.

But if the politicization of the attacks by the MAGA right is any indication of where things stand, I would not hold my breath hoping for non-political professionalism within the FBI’s future leadership.