MAGA Admires the Las Vegas Bomber

The MAGAsphere is starting to rally around the Las Vegas attacker after discovering that he was one of them. Matthew Livelberger, the 37-year old Green Beret who shot himself in a Cybertruck before blowing it up in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, “loved Trump” and “was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” his uncle told The Independent.

This has led to admiration from some of the MAGA faithful, even though the attack injured seven innocent people. “The Vegas dude seems like a real CHAD??” former Republican congressman and failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz posted on X, using internet slang that denotes (to some) a hypermasculine, fit, and often sexually successful individual.

Others quickly moved to dismiss any of the questions that a Trump supporter shooting himself and blowing up his car might otherwise raise: “Just seems like a test run of distractions to try and keep Trump from office,” one online MAGA supporter commented. “Seems like he was a loose end that needed to be tidied up. Someone should look into his travel history around the time of January 6, 2021, wrote another. “Also, if he had sniper training, could have been one of the CIA/DHS/DOD goons deployed against El Jefe in Butler, PA on 7/13.”

Livelsberger’s motive is still unknown, and may remain so. But that won’t stop MAGA from making him into their martyr.

Far-right voters are waking up to the fact that Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes don’t have voters at the forefront of their mind.

White supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes had a harsh message for his followers on Thursday, pitching that conservative leadership won’t care about their base until it benefits their odds of staying in power.

“Sorry. Thank you for your vote, now go fuck yourself,” Fuentes said. “That’s the message from the Republican Party for the next four, eight, 16, 100, 1,000 years. Thank you for your vote, now go fuck off until the next election.”

Fuentes briefly pulled his support from Trump in August, writing on X that he was declaring a “groyper war” on the Republican nominee. Fuentes explained that he and his far-right squad of online trolls “support Trump” but that they viewed his 2024 campaign as being “hijacked” by lobbyists, consultants, and donors that had aided Trump’s 2016 Republican opponents. At the time, Fuentes believed they were “blowing it.”

In recent weeks, Fuentes has been vocal about opposing the H-1B visa work program, which Elon Musk has ardently defended as 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.

On Thursday, that stance shockingly found Fuentes aligned with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who called out Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires for over-leveraging the work visa program to dump good-paying American jobs in favor of absurdly underpaid foreign labor.

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.”

Fuentes reshared the statement on X, writing, “Bernie Sanders is right. Elon and Trump are wrong.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has a slim shot at keeping his gavel Friday, as dozens of Republicans reportedly remain uncommitted to supporting the staunch ally of President-elect Donald Trump.

Representative Thomas Massie vowed Thursday night that he wouldn’t vote for Johnson, even under threat of torture.

During an interview on One America News’s The Matt Gaetz Show, Massie was asked by the titular former congressman and failed attorney general nominee whether an opportunity to lead a committee might sway him to support the embattled speaker.

“Oh no, you can pull all my fingernails out, you can shove bamboo up in them, you can start cutting off my fingers. I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow,” Massie declared.

Massie is among several Republicans to voice their concerns about Johnson, whose chaotic efforts to pass government spending legislation last month led several small government–type Republicans to question whether he is truly invested in gutting the federal government.

Massie’s defection is a big deal: Assuming that everyone is present and voting, Johnson can only afford to lose one Republican vote, according to The Hill. There are currently more than a dozen lawmakers who signaled last week that they weren’t yet committed to supporting Johnson, including Representatives Chip Roy, Victoria Spartz, Rich McCormick, and Andy Harris.

Johnson seems to remain optimistic about his chances. When asked Friday morning whether he thought he would win the first ballot, which is set to take place at noon, Johnson replied, “I think so.”

Trump published marching orders for Republicans on Truth Social Friday, urging them to support Johnson but mostly complimenting himself.

“Good luck today for Speaker Mike Johnson, a fine man of great ability, who is very close to having 100% support,” Trump wrote. “A win for Mike today will be a big win for the Republican Party, and yet another acknowledgment of our 129 year most consequential Presidential Election!!—A BIG AFFIRMATION, INDEED. MAGA!”

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.