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Welcome to Margin for Error, a political column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage and fallout of Campaign 2024..
On January 1, two American-born veterans of the occupation of Afghanistan were killed while using a rented truck to commit a sensational act of violence at a highly visible location in a major tourist destination. Shamsud-Din Jabbar reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS and then drove through a New Year’s crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 and wounding dozens more before police killed him in a shootout. The FBI said he had stated that he wanted to draw attention to the “war between believers and unbelievers.”
A few hours later, Matthew Livelsberger, an active-duty Green Beret, apparently shot himself in the head while lighting a load of fireworks and other flammable materials in a Tesla Cybertruck outside the gates of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. leaving seven other people with minor injuries. Investigators released the text of Livelsberger’s phone messages in which he described his “stunt with fireworks and explosives” as “a wake-up call” for the country. “Unite around Trump, Musk and Kennedy and ride this wave toward greater hegemony for all Americans!” he wrote.
In response to Jabbar’s attack, the New York Times published multiple articles on the dangerous international ideological influence of ISIS: “Amid the New Orleans attack, telltale signs of the brutal legacy of the Islamic State”; “How the Islamic State Radicalizes People Today”; “‘I joined ISIS’: The secret radicalization of the New Orleans attacker”. The articles continued to come even after investigators stated that Jabbar had acted alone and that his involvement with ISIS appeared to be strictly one-way, with no known connection to any of the group’s affiliates.
Just below the “Secret Radicalization” headline on its home page, the Times He had a story about what apparently brought Livelsberger to Las Vegas: “Soldiers’ struggles began long before Las Vegas explosion, nurse says.” A separate article about his messages, published the day before, was titled “Soldier in Tesla explosion had PTSD and feared US ‘collapse’, officials say”; a reader needed to read two-thirds of the way through, passing through quotes from Livelsberger about how “our soldiers no longer fight wars without end states or clear objectives” and how “I needed to clear my mind of the brothers I have lost.” and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took,” to get to the part where he wrote “that people should ‘try peaceful means first but be prepared to fight’ to get the Democrats out of the federal government.”
Jabbar and Livelsberger were apparently showing signs of unrest long before they rented their trucks, with the kind of unstable personal lives that almost always appear in the backstory of public acts of violence. Only one of them managed to turn his riot into a lesson about the threat of ideological radicalization.
Inevitably, part of this was that Jabbar was black and Livelsberger was white. Point by point, however, there were less pernicious reasons why the crimes have reached the media differently. A mass murder is more serious than a suicide, even if the suicide involves arson and explosives. He Times In particular, he saw Livelsberger as another case to weigh in on his ongoing grand theory research into the enormous hidden cost of traumatic brain injuries, which now extends from young football players to Top Gun pilots.
But behind all the available reasons and rationalizations was the well-established fact that the American press would rather attribute the violence to the influence of ISIS than to attribute the violence to the influence of Donald Trump. ISIS is foreign and fits the popular consensus image of “terrorism”; Most urgently, ISIS is not scheduled to be sworn in as president in two weeks.
The striking feature of Livelsberger’s writing was how ordinary it sounded. One of the two messages released by officials began with a note-by-note cover of the Trump campaign’s central message: “We are the United States of America, the best country people who ever lived! But right now we have a disease terminal and we are heading towards collapse.” What followed was a litany of standard populism from fatalists and/or influencers, the kind of grievances that underpin the Trump movement and that Elon Musk reorganized X to concentrate and amplify.
“The top one percent decided a long time ago that they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them,” Livelsberger wrote. “To them you are cattle.” And: “Many of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children become addicted to screens by the time they are two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.” And: “Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men should be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He complained about homelessness, called DEI a “cancer,” and declared (while endorsing Donald Trump) “We are done with blatant corruption.”
His other message was just as familiar, in a slightly different key: the key of Steve Bannon’s apocalyptic operator and the most militant participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol:
Military and veterans are moving to DC from now on. Militias facilitate and increase this activity.
They occupy all the main roads along the powered buildings and the powered buildings campus by the hundreds of thousands.
Block the roads with semi-trucks right after everyone enters. Hold position until purge is complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to remove Democrats from the federal government and military by any means necessary. Everyone must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.
Was this the tone of a mentally ill person? Yes. Was it the tone of the controlling faction of the Republican Party? Also, without a doubt, yes.
Throughout the Trump era, the media and non-Trumpist politicians have been obsessed with the idea that there should be a clear line between political beliefs and mental illness, and that one can never be blamed for the other. . Someone who sends pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and the media, or who chases and tries to strangle a non-white person while shouting “This is now Trump’s America!” he is simply a disturbed individual, not a representative of the broader political situation. When deranged people on the street began beating Asian-American passersby at the height of Trump’s talk about the “Wuhan flu” and the “Chinnnnna virus,” it couldn’t have had anything to do with the president . Those people were completely crazy and Trump was talking about the People’s Republic of China, not anyone in the United States.
At its most absurd, the reflex to separate politics from insanity led Nancy Pelosi to her disastrous tactic, after the attack on the Capitol, of urging Trump’s cabinet to declare him mentally incompetent and remove him under the 25th amendment, in instead of the Chamber challenging it on the spot. A president who tried to overthrow the constitution must have been too sick in the head to really be president. In the time Pelosi wasted, Trump threatened Republicans to re-align and escaped with his career intact.
Two years later, a Trump supporter broke into Pelosi’s house, in service of some deep MAGA conspiracy theory, and bashed her husband’s head in with a hammer. That person was certainly out of touch with objective reality, but that didn’t make him any less of a Trump supporter. Trump himself thought the attack was funny enough to make it part of his crowd-pleasing rally routine:
“We’re going up against crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco. Does anyone know how her husband is doing?” Trump said to a raucous crowd of California Republicans at a state party convention. “And he’s against building a wall on our border, even though he has a wall around his house, which he obviously didn’t do a good job of.”
What does responsibility mean in these circumstances? Or sanity? The president-elect is faced entirely with fantasy, paranoia and confusion. The willingness to believe in its message, or at least to profess it, is the organizing principle of the incoming government. He and his party leaders use the same talking points as mass shooters.
If Livelsberger had PTSD, or even the traumatic brain injury that Times Wait, his violent and destructive impulses were still shaped by the political movement he supported. Nothing in his messages, as mandated by law enforcement, was off-limits to the MAGA coalition; was no more incoherent than the person he praised as a “real President.” His idea that detonating a truck full of fireworks and flammable material in front of an occupied hotel was “not a terrorist attack” was clearly consistent with Trump’s speech on the morning of January 6, when he told his crowd that they had the constitutional duty to march on the Capital and “stop the steal”, and “fight like hell” as they did, but that this massive disruption would be done “peacefully and patriotically.”
The former and future Trump presidency is the result of a machine, built over decades, to channel people into fear and anger within a set of political stories. A portion of the people running the machine simply want that fear and anger to go to people who buy supplements and other scams, vote for representatives who will cut higher tax rates, post garbage to keep the fear and anger circulating, and harass officials at school board meetings. But more and more of them, including apparently the president-elect, increasingly believe in it or have forgotten how to distinguish it from any other, more verifiable version in the world. None of them care if some of their audience gets even more inspired and does other things. Four years after his peaceful and patriotic supporters beat and gassed police to force their way into the Capitol, Trump is reportedly on the verge of granting mass pardons to the mob.
“Americans,” Livelsberger wrote, “pay attention only to spectacle and violence.”
