Even by Donald Trump’s standards, the message was darkly apocalyptic – evoking memories of the infamous “American carnage” image he conjured at his first inaugural address eight years ago.
“The USA is breaking down,” the president-elect intoned grimly in a message posted on his Truth Social platform at six minutes past midnight on 2 January.
“A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it,” he wrote.
The pessimistic outpouring was triggered by the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans’ French Quarter that killed 14 – followed hours later by an apparently unconnected event outside Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas, when a Tesla Cybertruck, built by the company owned by his biggest supporter and benefactor, Elon Musk, blew up.
Delivered just 18 days before his return to the White House, Trump’s bleak prognosis seemed an ominous harbinger of counter-violence – especially when combined with his false accompanying message that the episodes confirmed his frequent warnings against open borders and illegal immigrants. Both perpetrators were American-born US citizens.
“It’s about the most extreme language you can get when it comes to anti-immigrant comments,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a group dedicated to tracking far-right movements.
“The attacks on immigrants, coming from Trump for a long time now, and inflamed by the situation where the person who did the [New Orleans] attack is not even an immigrant, are certainly going to raise the level of violence and attacks on immigrants in the country.”
Brian Levin, a professor emeritus at California State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said Trump’s comments following previous violent events had consistently fuelled an upsurge in hate crimes.
Anti-Muslim hate offences following an attack by a radicalised Islamist husband-and-wife team that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015 increased by 20% after Trump waded in on social media and in a speech in North Carolina five days afterwards, Levin said.
The attack happened at a time when Trump was already proposing a ban on Muslims entering the US as a response to what he termed “radical, Islamist terrorism”.
Similarly, protests following the death of George Floyd during his first presidency led to a surge in anti-Black crime after Trump’s notorious “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” comment, according to Levin, citing FBI and local police data.
“Statements by presidents and other political leaders have a violent impact downstream,” he said. “Those toxins surface elsewhere. When the president or other high, really high political figures use stereotypes and conspiracy theories or incomplete information, it ends up reverberating into aggression on the streets.”
The corollary was George W Bush’s appearance at the Islamic Center in Washington in the days after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, when his calming message of “Islam is peace” led to a downward trend in anti-Muslim hate crimes that had risen in the immediate aftermath of the atrocities.
The current danger, Levin argues, is that Trump’s rhetoric will lead to vigilante-type actions among his most zealous supporters who feel empowered to act on their own – sometimes against individuals not necessarily in the incoming president’s line of fire.
“We’re concerned that this will in some way be taken as a message to folks who think they’ve been deputised to go after people who they think are undocumented,” Levin said.
Such a scenario seemed to unfold last month in Colorado when a journalist alleged he was pursued and assaulted by a man who told him: “Are you even a US citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
The alleged victim told police he believed he had been targeted because he was a Pacific islander.
The verbal aggression unleashed by Trump “expands to people and groups that assailants will believe are in the same cohort”, Levin argued, to encompass other minority groups, including Jews.
“Facts don’t matter in the mind of an aggrieved bigot, whether it relates to they’re eating the dogs or eating the cats,” he said, referring to Trump’s notorious and unfounded allegation made about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during last September’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
Trump’s misrepresentation of the New Orleans attack as vindication for his depiction of an America overrun by violent criminal migrants also runs the risk of obscuring the resurgent threat of terror attacks from the Islamic State (IS).
The suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is a 42-year-old from Texas who spent 13 years in the US army and is believed to have become radicalised after converting to Islam. An Islamic State flag was found on the truck that he drove into a crowd of new year revellers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street.
“Isis is going to be a day one problem for the Trump administration,” said Colin Clarke, research director at the Soufan Center, a New York-based foreign policy thinktank. “It’s quite obvious that the group is on the upswing and its propaganda continues to be convincing and resonate with individuals in the west.”
Countering it will require assembling a “top-notch team of counter-terrorism experts”, Clarke says, a priority that will force Trump to downgrade the importance of political loyalists and ideologies and instead rely on organisations, such as the FBI and CIA, that he has regularly denounced as part a “deep state”.
Clarke and other analysts say the intelligence community has been forced to divert its focus from IS in recent years amid rising concern over far-right extremism and sabotage from foreign adversaries such as Russia and China.
“We’ve had our eye off the ball for quite some time,” said Alex Goldenberg, a senior director of Narravance, a threat intelligence organisation, who warned of the enduring influence of the Islamic State’s “historical online presence”.
“The national security apparatus has been focused heavily on rightwing extremism, which is crucial, but Islamic extremism is still very much a threat that needs to be taken seriously,” he said. “Recently, Isis has called on their Telegram channels and various other social media channels for attacks around the holiday season, even recommending the use of vehicles or rented or stolen vehicles.
“The possibility of similar attacks [to New Orleans] in the near and distant future is … a disturbing possibility.”
Levin, a former New York city police officer, fears that forces from across the political spectrum unleashed by Trump’s political renaissance, coupled with destabilising global events, could produce a “perfect storm” of political violence during the president-elect’s second term.
“There’s going to be several types of extremists that are going to be emboldened by Trump,” he said.
Many will probably come from the far right, but a lesser but rising threat was also likely to emerge from the hard left.
“If you look at the early 70s, when Nixon was in office and we had a war going on [in Vietnam], we saw hard-left groups like SLA [Symbionese Liberation Army] and the Weather Underground have a resurgence,” Levin argued.
“Couple that with what we have going on internationally, where we have the highest frequency of conflicts we’ve seen in some time; add in idiosyncratic extremists, either their single-issue or idiosyncratic prejudices and hatreds, then you see there really is a perfect storm. The key words going forward are everything, everywhere, all at once. We’re diversifying and evolving with regard to extremism.”
