Now that the immediate questions from the attack in New Orleans have passed, we’re seeing a scripted flood of Republican speakers who insist on the urgency to confirm Donald Trump’s justice and national security appointees.
Fox, Breitbart, Newsmax and other right-leaning news outlets noticeably have been featuring a string of remarkably similar, almost jarring pronouncements by Republican members of Congress pushing for immediate confirmation of new leadership in Justice, Homeland Security, intelligence agencies and the FBI – as if that is an answer to “lone-wolf” terrorist activity.
Donald Trump himself has doubled down on blaming what he calls open borders to migrants for what he sees as rising urban violence that somehow was responsible for the now-dead, 42-year-old, Texas born Army veteran who decided to speed a pickup truck around police barriers on Bourbon Street, killing 14 and injuring a couple dozen more.
Somehow blaming Joe Biden, Democrats and border politics provides MAGA advocates an emotional release but doesn’t address what happened this week. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., said law enforcement agencies are spending too much effort on diversity and inclusion concerns rather than crime-stopping, as if they couldn’t be doing both.
With facts now in, the New Orleans incident simply does not relate to questions about the appropriateness of the backgrounds of appointees including Pam Bondi as Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard as leading the intelligence community, and Kash Patel to lead the FBI reflect a strange leap of logic. Indeed, absolutism to choose retribution against Trump political enemies might be just the same kind of blind that Scalise and others say comes from “woke” concerns.
The New Orleans killer apparently acted alone, inspired by ISIS propaganda transmitted through public internet and in contradiction to any understandable concerns about effects on others. He spent his time at Fort Hood, not crossing the border, and yet, somehow, we’re supposed to listen to the voices of senators who will sit in judgment about these appointees about how confirmations will make such terror incidents disappear.
It doesn’t wash.
What Did We Learn?
The coming hearings may well end in confirming some or all of Trump’s appointees, but the fact is that there is little in the backgrounds of the key players that suggests they are better prepared than current job holders to defend against individuals who choose to use trucks and homemade explosive devices as weapons against soft targets.
At their best, these national agencies are rigged to uncover plots and schemes for terror by organized groups by using surveillance and counter-terrorism techniques. They aim to monitor and disrupt international terrorists, state-sponsored terrorist groups, plots that aim for another 9/11 moment or the kind of attacks seen against Israel.
Indeed, it is not hard to argue that the Trump national security team is being directed to be so focused on finding and deporting 11 million migrants that they will have no bandwidth for looking to discover the next New Orleans attacker. We saw just this week that the apparently coincidental timing of an exploding Tesla truck outside the Las Vegas Trump hotel was another loner — and another military vet and vocal Trump supporter to boot — someone whose left-behind notes said he wanted to remove all Democrats in Washington. Where is Trump and company on that?
It would seem obvious that issue number one for these appointees is whether they can take in information and sort it for relevance to the problem at hand. We seek “judgment” in these appointees. Without that, there is no policy, no deployment, no ideology, no personal loyalty to Trump will help provide for a more predictably safe America.
Media Matters noted anew the feedback loop between Fox News and Trump world, in which something is said on Fox, true or not, and MAGA members spend the next three days individually reacting to the original statement. In this case, the original statement was incorrect — that the pickup truck involved in New Orleans has passed across the border two days before the event, a report retracted an hour later, but not stopping Trump from connecting the attack to immigration woes.
So, after the attack this week, the biggest apparent problem was Trump’s insistence on deciding that an attack that had nothing to do with immigration was the fault of Biden border politics. He has taken pains to assure us that he is picking people who agree with him about immigration — and apparently a connection to stopping such lone-wolf terror attacks. He and Republican speakers are doing little to persuade that his appointees even understand what happened this week, never mind prepare us to ward off the next attack.
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