The Warning Signs Were All There

The apparent terror attack in New Orleans was a tragedy. But it wasn’t a shock.

It’s not how we’d hoped to welcome you back from the holidays—not only with news of a deadly terror attack, but also with a reminder of how the next president of the United States will be responding to such things. Here was Donald Trump shortly after midnight this morning, riffing on an already-debunked Fox News story that the truck used to carry out the horrific New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border days before:

Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership. The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country.

Happy 2025, and good luck out there.

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Police cordon off the intersection of Canal Street and Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 1, 2025. (Photo by Matthew Hinton / AFP via Getty Images)

Horror in the Big Easy

by Will Selber

In the months before 9/11, there were plenty of warning signs about an imminent al Qaeda attack on the United States. As CIA Director George Tenet later described it, “the system was blinking red.”

The system has been blinking red again since the summer, with clear indicators of an impending terrorist attack inspired or directed by the Islamic State. Now it may have started.

At about 3:00 a.m. on New Year’s morning in the French Quarter of New Orleans, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabar, a former U.S. Army staff sergeant and combat veteran, plowed a rented white pickup truck through a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 and injuring scores of others. He then fired on the police before they killed him. From pictures posted to social media, it appears that Jabar, who reportedly served nearly a year in Afghanistan, was killed wearing Army fatigues, likely those he wore on active duty.

Following his death, law enforcement authorities recovered and detonated multiple improvised explosive devices, possibly pipe bombs. They also identified the flag affixed to Shamsud’s vehicle as that of the Islamic State. President Biden later revealed that Shamsud’s social media posts shortly before his attack indicated he was inspired by ISIS. The FBI also announced that they suspect Shamsud did not act alone.

A few hours after the deadly attack in New Orleans, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, killing one and wounding several others. At a press conference, officials revealed that the vehicle had been loaded with fireworks and canisters of gasoline, and that one individual had been in the car when it exploded.

While it is unknown if these two attacks are linked, the symbolism suggests they might be: Radical Islamist terrorists often choose targets that represent what they consider American moral and cultural profanity. The World Trade Center was to them a symbol of greed and materialism; the Pentagon represents militarism and imperialism; Bourbon Street and the Las Vegas strip are synecdoches for debauchery and sin.

Later in the afternoon, the FBI’s Houston field office announced they were conducting “law enforcement activity” related to the New Orleans attack.

While the timing of these attacks may have been a surprise, there have been numerous near misses throughout 2024. Over the last ten weeks, at least five individuals across the country were detained because of ties to the Islamic State. This doesn’t include the eight Tajik nationals who were arrested and subsequently deported in October following a nationwide manhunt due to suspected ties to the Islamic State.

Nobody inside the United States government should be surprised by these attacks. The Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban have been broadcasting their intent to attack the United States for years.

There may be more attacks in the coming days. There’s nothing to indicate that this Islamic State cell is finished, or that it’s the only one. If the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks are linked, then we can’t discount the likelihood that there are multiple active Islamic State cells looking for targets of opportunity across the country.

At some point, we decided we were done with radical Islamic terrorists. But that doesn’t mean they’re done with us.

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Les Jeux Sont Faits

by William Kristol

When I was in high school, I saw the James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In a climactic scene, Bond is taking on the bad guy at baccarat in a casino in Monte Carlo. And when the bets are down, the dealer proclaims, at once elegantly and portentously, “Les jeux sont faits, monsieur.”

I remember thinking at the time how great it would be, when I got older, to go to Monte Carlo, to play baccarat for high stakes, and to be told “les jeux sont faits.”

Ah well, life has its share of disappointments. I never became a secret agent or a high-stakes gambler. I’ve never been to Monte Carlo. I’ve never even played baccarat. And I’ve never heard a dealer tell me “les jeux sont faits.” I have heard dealers and croupiers tell me, no more bets or all bets in—but somehow it sounds better in French.

In any case, over the holidays—in McLean, not Monte Carlo—I was talking with a friend about the current political moment. We lamented the election results. We discussed how much damage Trump and his gang could do at home and abroad. We worried about the irresolution and weaknesses of some of our allies in the opposition. The situation, we concluded morosely, was not only alarming but depressing.

But as I write this first newsletter of the new year, I don’t feel depressed. For some reason the coming of the new year has had the effect, at least for now, of focusing the mind and stiffening the spine. Worried and alarmed? Of course. But determined rather than depressed, motivated rather than morose. Les jeux sont faits. What we need to do is not to wring our hands but win the hand.

Perhaps this is especially striking to those of us who have spent some time laboring in the vineyards of American government and politics, doing our best (sometimes, to be sure, misguidedly or ineffectively) to bring about what we thought were desirable outcomes. All those struggles seemed important at the time. Some were. But this, this seems to be a real moment of truth.

It would have been nice to have been able to continue to coast, in a sense, on the achievements of our predecessors from the last century. It would be nice if failure today wouldn’t be so consequential.

But we live at an inflection point almost as fundamental as those of the last century. We live at a moment when liberal democracy is under attack at home and abroad, but also at a moment of inspiring examples of people fighting for freedom and decency. We live at a moment of the degradation of the democratic dogma, but also, for some, at a moment of a renewed sense of the worth of liberal democracy. We live at a time of extraordinary failures of leadership, but also at a time of inspiring examples of leadership. We live at a time when we can prove ourselves worthy heirs to our impressive predecessors, or at a time when we could fail to rise to the occasion.

We don’t know how things will turn out. It could go either way. But here not in the movies but in the real world, at the beginning of 2025—les jeux sont faits.

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Quick Hits

TO H-1B, OR NOT TO H-1B: Official Washington may slow to a crawl over the Christmas break, but the Posting Wars never stop. So it was that the MAGA internet spent the holidays melting down in its first big internal fight since Trump’s reelection. While you were polishing off your leftover cookies, Elon Musk was telling right-wing critics to “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.” And while you were prepping for your New Year’s party, Steve Bannon was warning Musk and his ilk not to “come up and go the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be” or “we’re going to rip your face off.”¹

What had them all so hot and bothered? The question of what Trump will do about the H-1B program, which lets U.S. companies import skilled foreign labor to fill specific jobs.

It’s a wonkier issue than you’d usually see raising the blood pressure of the MAGAheads, but it also lies directly on a major fault line between two Trump coalitions. Hardcore immigration hawks like Bannon and Stephen Miller think H-1B is a crock that undercuts American workers by letting companies staff up with (generally cheaper) foreigners whose immigration status is at the mercy of their employer. The new MAGA tech cohort—guys like Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks, and Bill Ackman—see the program as a way for the United States to reap the rewards of attracting the rest of the world’s best and brightest.

Vox has a good explainer on how the whole fight went down, if you’re a sicko who’s into that sort of thing. Last time he was president, Trump was a Millerhead who harshly criticized the H-1B program and even put a temporary pause on it. Now, though, he’s singing a different tune: “I’ve been a believer in H-1B,” the president-elect told the New York Post on Saturday. “I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” Will that new posture last? Who knows!

It’s a data point that suggests Trump remains enamored—for now!—with the shinier, newer toy of the Based Tech Bros who spent hundreds of millions to get him elected. This is how it’s going to be from now on, we guess: The various pieces of the MAGA coalition shriek at each other for a while, and then Trump goes with his money men gut.

The whole thing comes as a reminder that MAGA is only a stable political coalition when it’s out of power. The thing that unites all these people is a seething contempt for whoever’s in charge when they’re not—the establishment, the mainstream media, the elites, “the left,” whatever. Put them in charge, though, and ask them to start making decisions of their own on how to run things? They’re not even in yet, and look how it’s already playing out.

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ALL CARROT, NO STICK: In his 2024 year-end report, Chief Justice John Roberts politely asked elected officials everywhere to keep honoring the decisions of the federal judiciary:

Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the court, popular or not, have been followed. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

As the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus notes, this sounds an awful lot like a subtweet of incoming Vice President JD Vance, who has repeatedly argued that Trump should ignore court orders that he believes unconstitutionally constrain his executive authority. “If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘you’re not allowed to do that’—like, that is the constitutional crisis,” Vance told Politico last March. “It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response.”

Roberts better hope asking nicely will do the trick. After all, he was the one who reached into his bag of tricks last year to carve out a broad new definition of criminal immunity for a president’s “official acts.” Like much of the rest of the country, Roberts appears to be entering the new year with a bizarre optimism: Sure, the incoming administration has openly said it will do many alarming things. But wouldn’t it be nice if they just didn’t?

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Cheap Shots

1. Picking a side in MAGAland these days is apparently a matter of picking what unpleasant thing is going to happen to your face.