GOP Senselessly Blames Terror Attacks on Southern Border

First DEI and now the southern border—Republicans have been remarkably quick to blame the attacks in Las Vegas and New Orleans this week on their favorite bogeymen. It came from the top first. The president-elect took to Truth Social Thursday morning to rail against Joe Biden’s immigration policy.

“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA.”

Matthew Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, recently named by law enforcement as the suspects in the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion and New Orleans fatal truck attack, respectively, were both U.S. citizens and military veterans. Livelsberger was even a Green Beret. The southern border has seemingly nothing to do with the attacks.

Even still, the GOP focused on border policy after two natural-born American citizens committed acts of terror. “I don’t know if enough attention is being paid to this, but we all know that for the last four years, the Biden Administration has been completely derelict in its duty,” Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Thursday. “Congressional Republicans, we here in the House and the Senate, have repeatedly asked the DHS under the Biden administration about the correlation, the obvious concern, about terrorism and the wide-open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potential terrorist cells around the country; we have been ringing the alarms.”

Incoming border czar Tom Homan also joined in on the misinformation campaign, telling Fox News that “border patrol continues to release people into this country without proper vetting.”

Our incoming national security adviser thinks we should respond to the attack that killed 14 in New Orleans, and the seemingly unrelated Cybertruck explosion that injured seven in Las Vegas, by fast-tracking all of Trump’s Cabinet picks. “This is why getting President Trump’s Cabinet in is so important,” Republican Representative Mike Waltz said on Fox & Friends Thursday morning. “We need Governor [Kristi] Noem at DHS, we need Kash Patel at FBI, we need Pete Hegseth at DOD; this is an across the government look,” he told the network. “Marco Rubio at State and of course Ratcliffe at CIA and Gabbard at DNI. That has to be in place day one guys, because this is a moment in transition of vulnerability and President Trump is going to project, because he is a leader of strength. The narrative that we project on day one will be just important, and that’s having our people in place.”

Waltz is suggesting that all of Trump’s nominees should be able to bypass the normal (and frankly needed, given Hegseth’s and Patel’s questionable histories) vetting process because they would be that much better equipped to handle the current situation.  

Senator-elect Bernie Moreno had similar sentiments on New Year’s Day. “After what appears to potentially be an ISIS inspired terrorist attack last night in New Orleans, it’s even more vital that we quickly confirm all of President Trump’s nominees,” he wrote on X. “Every single national security nominee should be confirmed & ready to protect America by January 20th.”

Most of Trump’s nominees, especially Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, are expected to have testy confirmation hearings. The GOP using such devastating attacks for their own political benefit could potentially backfire, particularly as more information emerges; Matthew Livelsberger—the man identified as having shot himself in a Tesla Cybertruck before it exploded in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas—was a Trump voter, The Daily Beast reported Thursday afternoon.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has thrown himself into the H-1B visa feud between Elon Musk and the far-right’s MAGA acolytes.

Musk and some of Donald Trump’s more ardent supporters have gone head-to-head over the last several weeks, with the world’s richest man arguing that the work visa program offers a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the United States. Opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor. Some of the most vocal opponents are people such as “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who probably aren’t happy that some of the visa recipients aren’t white.

But on Thursday, Sanders pointed out a quiet, fundamental catch to the Silicon Valley leader’s argument: Musk’s business interests dramatically benefit from open access to inhumanely cheap labor.

“Elon Musk is wrong,” Sanders posted on X. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.

“The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make,” he said.

In a formal statement, Sanders’s office noted that in 2022 and 2023, “the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers.

“There are estimates that as many as 33 percent of all new Information Technology jobs in America are being filled by guest workers,” the statement reads. “Further, according to Census Bureau data, there are millions of Americans with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math who are not currently employed in those professions.”

The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.

Extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan—as his MAGA acolytes want to—could raise the national deficit by as much as $5 trillion. In response, Republicans are floating some rather extreme options to offset the cost, including raising tariffs on foreign goods, repealing clean energy programs, and axing some of the nation’s largest federal agencies, such as the Department of Education.

Trump’s tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations, would balloon the national debt, which currently sits at $36.2 trillion. Nonpartisan groups that have assessed the president-elect’s agenda predict that Trump’s second term could cost the nation much more, possibly increasing it by as much as $15 trillion, reported The Washington Post.

At the top of the list of options to offset costs is a broad tariff plan, which could spare the nation some $2.7 trillion over 10 years by adding levies on goods from China, Mexico, and Canada. (The plan has sent the latter of the trio into a tailspin, with Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s former deputy prime minister and minister of finance, resigning just hours before releasing the nation’s first economic plan in response to Trump’s “America First” policies.)

But what’s good for Trump isn’t necessarily good for Americans: In a joint letter released before the election, nearly two dozen Nobel Prize–winning economists formally warned against Trump’s economic plan, arguing that the MAGA leader’s stiff tariff increases and tax cuts would spell disaster for the average American.

Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022—one of President Joe Biden’s chief legislative victories—saving some $700 billion from the federal deficit. Doing so, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.

A different path forward to scrimp and save includes cutting “unauthorized” spending, or money that Congress has not explicitly authorized. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the assumed co-chairs of the Department of Government Efficiency (which does not yet exist), have claimed that slashing this category would save $516 billion. But it would also come with major cuts to veterans’ health care, the State and Justice Departments, and NASA.

Another cashflow could come from eliminating the Department of Education, which would save some $200 billion from the deficit—while simultaneously dismantling the nation’s education system, which locally relies on billions from the federal government to support low-income and low-performing schools.

The man who allegedly detonated fireworks inside a Tesla Cybertruck in front of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, was reportedly a supporter of the president-elect.

Law enforcement officials identified Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret, as the deceased driver of the Cybertruck in Wednesday’s incident, according to CNN.

A senior law enforcement official told The Daily Beast Thursday that Livelsberger was a “big” Donald Trump supporter, a fact that had been uncovered through conversations with Livelsberger’s family and loved ones.

Dean Livelsberger, the uncle of the deceased, told The Independent Thursday that his nephew “loved” Trump.

“He used to have all patriotic stuff on Facebook, he was 100 percent loving the country,” said Dean Livelsberger.

“He loved Trump. He was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American. It’s one of the reasons he was in Special Forces for so many years. It wasn’t just one tour of duty,” he added. Livelsberger had served as an operations master sergeant in the Army Special Forces, on active duty in Germany, but was on leave at the time of his death, three officials told CNN.

Online, Livelsberger once criticized John Bolton, Trump’s ex-national security adviser, who wrote a scathing rebuke of his former boss in his memoir.

“Bet Bolton got a hefty chunk from the DNC and other slimy donors to put the book out,” Livelsberger wrote in a Facebook comment under an article about Bolton, according to The Daily Beast.

While the symbolic nature of the incident appears to refer to the partnership between the president-elect and Elon Musk, Livelsberger’s motive is still unknown. Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill suggested Thursday that the incident, which injured seven people, was likely a suicide.