Democrat Trashes GOP for Playing “Games” With Terror Attack

Democratic Representative Troy Carter is torching Republicans for leveraging the horrific New Year’s Eve attack in New Orleans as short-lived political fodder.

Speaking with CNN on Thursday, the Louisiana Democrat flamed conservative leadership, accusing the party of using the deaths of 15 people to push misinformation that directly benefits their agenda.

“This is an American attack. This is an attack on our democracy. This is an attack on our freedoms. This person was radicalized, but it was an American citizen, a citizen of Texas, and someone who was honorably discharged from the United States Army,” Carter told anchor Brianna Keilar. “And we should not play games with the American people to try and imply that it was something that it wasn’t, which somehow suggests that this was a Democrat or Republican issue. And we have to be more mature and more direct and fair and honest with the American people.”

“This is not the time to play political brinkmanship or gamesmanship,” he continued.

Carter was, in part, responding to a lengthy rant that Donald Trump posted to Truth Social on Thursday, in which he repeatedly claimed that the domestic terrorism incident was the result of open borders and the Democratic establishment. In the same breath, the president-elect attacked the FBI and the Department of Justice, baselessly accusing the agencies of being distracted by his own wrongdoing to prevent terrorist attacks.

But Trump’s nativist messaging is in direct conflict with the facts of the case: The FBI’s suspect for the attack, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is a U.S. citizen born in Texas. And choosing to undermine the reputation of investigative agencies looking into the attack is a hair-raising choice for the man about to retake the White House in 18 days.

“This is a time that we should be united as Americans to push back against terrorism, push back against terrorist threats, and to demonstrate to the American people that we will use every resource that we have to combat these kind of hateful and heinous acts,” Carter said. “The families of the loved ones who have died and those who are in the hospital fighting for their lives, and our law enforcement agents from the federal, local, and state deserve better.”

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.

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.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts echoed Donald Trump while hitting back at critics who’ve suggested that federal judges may have political biases.

In his 2024 Year End report on the federal judiciary, published Tuesday, Roberts conflated violence and intimidation with genuine criticism of the courts’ decisions. He listed suggestions of political bias among doxxing and disinformation as some of the “illegitimate activity” that threatens independent judges.

“Public officials, too, regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges—for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote.

“Within the past year we have also seen the need for state and federal bar associations to come to the defense of a federal district judge whose decisions in a high-profile case prompted an elected official to call for her impeachment,” Roberts continued, likely referring to Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who tossed out the classified documents case against the president-elect last year.

At every turn of that case, Cannon slowed proceedings, and ultimately defied precedent. Her shocking final decision resulted in the dissolution of charges against a political candidate who then reportedly put her on the short list for attorney general (he would later find even worse candidates).

“Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed,” Roberts continued. “Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others.”

Last year, Trump was so persistent in “suggesting” that New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw his hush-money trial, and his family were politically biased that he was landed with a hefty gag order. This, however, earned no mention from Roberts, but probably only because it had to do with a state case, not a federal one. No other reason.

Roberts’s remarks echo those of Trump, who, impossibly, complained about publicly criticizing judges and has suggested it should be illegal to do so.

“They play the ref, they start screaming about ‘The judge is no good,’ and ‘This one’s no good,’ and ‘They’re slow’ and ‘They’re lousy judges’ and ‘The judge should be impeached,’ and all of this crap, when you have a brilliant judge that’s doing the right thing,” Trump ranted during an 11th Hour Faith Leaders Meeting in Concord, North Carolina, in October.

“I really believe it’s illegal what they do, and I know there’s some great lawyers in there who are gonna look at it, because what they do is so obvious, what they’ve done to the Supreme Court, even with the protection of their houses, you’re not supposed to be allowed to march in front. They didn’t stop it,” he continued.

Trump has also claimed that judges would often “give a bad ruling” in an attempt to silence critics, but unsurprisingly gave no evidence to support that claim.

In any case, it’s difficult to imagine how Roberts, terrified of suggestions of political bias, will weather the coming four years under Trump, who intends to utilize the highest court in the land to make sweeping changes to the schema of rights and continue to deregulate the federal government. Trump will likely get away with everything he wants—in many such cases, he already has.

Last year, Roberts found himself behind the steering wheel of the most conservative court in a century for the decision in Trump’s presidential immunity case. The Supreme Court’s ruling in that case single-handedly opened the door for Trump’s return to the White House and cemented this court’s conservative lean for decades to come.