On the menu today: I hate to be the bearer of bad news to start the new year, but there’s no getting around it. America began 2025 with not just one but two terrorist attacks on the streets of major cities, the FBI was extremely slow to declare that the attacks were exactly what they looked like from the start, and the response from our 82-year-old president was as feeble and halting as you would fear. As if that wasn’t bad enough, please stay until the end for some of the saddest news I’ve ever had to share.
New Year’s Tragedy
Shortly after we rang in the new year, two men — using the same car-rental app — took rented vehicles to the heart of two great American cities and tried to kill as many people as possible.
Authorities have now identified the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck — who was killed when the vehicle blew up outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas — as Colorado resident and Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger. Reportedly Livelsberger and the perpetrator of the New Orleans attack, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, both served at Fort Bragg (now named Fort Liberty), but there’s not yet any confirmation that the two men served there simultaneously or that they knew each other. Keep in mind, “Ten percent of the Army’s forces are assigned to Fort Liberty including 50,662 military and 14,036 Department of Defense civilian personnel who work there,” and the base “spans across 160,700 acres or 251 square miles. The compound is so large that it touches four counties.” So even if the two men served at Fort Bragg at the same time, it’s conceivable they never encountered each other.
Whatever you think of the U.S. “war on terror” and whether it ever ended, the threat of terrorism never completely disappeared. You may not be interested in terrorism, but terrorism is interested in you.
The car bomb in Las Vegas killed one person and injured at least seven more. When you detonate a truck made by the company of Elon Musk in front of a hotel with Donald Trump’s name on it, I think the political message of the attack is awfully darn clear. Nonetheless, the New York Times reports that as of yesterday, the FBI was still attempting to determine whether placing gas canisters, camp fuel canisters, and large firework mortars in a car associated with Musk, and in front of a building associated with Trump, meets their technical definition of “terrorism”:
“There is no further threat to the community,” [Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department] said. As of Wednesday afternoon, there was no indication that the explosion was connected to ISIS, which President Biden said had inspired the New Orleans attack, but the investigation remains ongoing, he said.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Jeremy Schwartz, the acting F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said the agency is investigating whether the explosion “was an act of terrorism or not.”
“I know everybody’s interested in that word and trying to see if we can say, ‘Hey this is a terrorist attack,’” Mr. Schwartz said. “That is our goal, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Does anyone in the FBI seriously think the choice of vehicle and location for detonation were just coincidences?
This hesitancy to call detonating a car explosion in the center of Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve “terrorism” comes after Alethea Duncan, New Orleans FBI assistant special agent in charge, initially said in a press conference, “As [New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne] Kirkpatrick said, we’ll be taking over the investigative lead for this event. This is not a terrorist event. What it is right now, is there improvised explosive devices that was found [sic], and we are working on confirming if this is a viable device or not [sic].”
If you’re finding improvised explosive devices — whether they’re viable or not — why would you declare that it is not a terrorist event?
The FBI subsequently declared in a written statement, “We are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism.”
But it often feels as if in circumstances like this the FBI has a definition of “terrorism” that is as specific and pedantic as Rob Lowe’s character’s definition of champagne in Wayne’s World. Unless it is imported from the specific “Terrorista” region of the Islamic State, it’s merely sparkling mass violence.
In the case of the New Orleans attack, it may well be that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a troubled guy, with a life unraveling from a messy divorce, increasing debts, and failed business ventures — your garden-variety angry, middle-aged man lashing out at a world that he feels has done him wrong. But the investigation has reportedly turned up a series of videos where he “discussed planning to kill his family and having dreams that helped inspire him to join ISIS.” In other words, whether he was ever a “member” of ISIS, he turned to ISIS to give his life purpose and meaning. (Straight out of someone’s twisted fiction.)
When Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove into a crowd of New Year’s revelers with a pickup truck flying an Islamic State flag and then engaged in a shootout with the police, his psychopathic, murderous intent shocked the nation. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have. This tactic is a well-known and celebrated ISIS calling card. The carnage on Bourbon Street is the direct descendant of the 2016 Islamic State truck rampage in Nice, France, that killed 86 people and injured hundreds of others. It’s the deranged offspring of the 2016 attack in Berlin’s Christmas market that killed 13. It’s the direct follow-up to the 2017 truck attack that killed eight people and injured a dozen others on Manhattan’s West Side.
There have been many other such incidents over the years, including in London, in Spain, and in Canada.
Around midafternoon yesterday, when it became clear that the country has suffered two simultaneous terrorist attacks, people started to notice that the only response from President Joe Biden had been a two-paragraph released statement that he was being “continually briefed.”
Finally, in the early evening hours, our squinty, mumbling president read off a teleprompter for four minutes and after pledging, “We will keep you fully, contemporaneously informed,” served up the trademark move of his administration by turning from the podium and ignoring the shouted questions.
Our Jeff Blehar expressed what almost everyone is thinking but can’t seem to say out loud:
Was anyone reassured by that speech? Did it alleviate anyone’s unease that the sitting president of the United States is a half-functional, quasi-vegetative person at this point?
I am also here to ask why we as Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that tolerating a president who is permanently mentally incapacitated invites crises like these. Nineteen days yet remain until the animate shell of Joe Biden formally departs from the presidency. Pray for peace and hold your breath until then.
ADDENDUM: In the first hours of 2025, Elaine, “Miss E.,” the wife of my dear friend Cam Edwards, returned to her Creator. It was her final step in a battle with lung cancer that she had fought, with unimaginable grit and determination, for eight and a half years.
It’s become something of a cliché to say of the departed that they were so “full of life.” But if you ever had a chance to meet Elaine, you know what a force of nature she is — was, pardon me, I’m still getting used to past tense when referring to her. She was a classic farm mother out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder story — strong and loving, feisty, hilarious, blunt, full of love, and loved. It was a painful irony that someone whose life defined the word “indefatigable” was subjected to a fight so exhausting.
If you never had a chance to meet her, Cam and Elaine did a joint podcast, Fowl Language, focused on the ups and downs of their life down in Farmville, Va. (My buddy wasn’t just a successful radio talk-show host and the Elvis Presley of the NRA’s annual meeting, but he and Elaine raised goats and chickens.) She homeschooled her younger children, managed the yard with a propane torch, and shot the occasional fox prowling around the henhouse.
She leaves behind an adoring family that had come to think of her as indestructible, and a wide-ranging circle of friends who now see this new year as a quilt with a patch ripped out of it. Elaine packed so much into her time here, but at this moment, that just makes me feel like she deserved so much more time.
Cam and I talked on New Year’s Day, and as is his nature, he did more to console me than the other way around. Elaine kept cancer at bay long enough to watch her youngest children step into young adulthood. She had the time and opportunities to say her goodbyes to her loved ones. She departed this life without pain, and Cam was able to hold her hand when she passed. It’s true that lot of good people in this world don’t get those small blessings, but it still doesn’t feel like enough.
At some point there will be a GoFundMe established for all the expenses that accumulate when someone dies long before her time, and don’t worry, you’ll be hearing about it from me.