Thank you everyone for hanging in with me and the rest of the Hullabahooligans this past year. 2025 is going to be tough but we’ll get through it together!
As authorities investigate Wednesday’s New Orleans truck attack on Bourbon Street and the Cybertruck explosion in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, one odd detail links the two. Or doesn’t. Both vehicles were rented using the peer-to-peer rental app, Turo.
Axios reports that Clark County/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Kevin McMahill said “there was no immediate indication of a connection between the two events, but ‘we are investigating every aspect of this.’ “
The owner of the Ford pickup truck used in New Orleans recognized his vehicle when he saw footage showing the truck and license plate on the news. He had rented the truck to a 42-year-old Army veteran who then used it to ram into crowds on Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more.
[…]
In Las Vegas, the police said during a news conference that the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump Hotel’s lobby entrance, killing one and injuring at least seven others, was also rented from Turo. Officials called it a “coincidence” and said they were continuing to investigate any possible connections.
The driver in the New Orleans attack, identified as Texas-born Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police.
The Army veteran who rammed a pickup into New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street was “inspired by” the Islamic State terrorist organization, President Biden said Wednesday night in a short address from Camp David. In videos posted to social media shortly before the attack in New Orleans that killed at least 15, the man indicated that he had a “desire to kill,” Mr. Biden said.
Elon Musk and Tesla are issuing statements and doing spin control, as is Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization.
Turo issued a statement saying, “We do not believe that either renter involved in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat.” The company is cooperating with the FBI on the New Orleans investigation, reports the Associated Press.
That’s two coincidences
A Colorado man rented the Cybertruck and drove it to Las Vegas. Police were still working on extracting the body late Wednesday. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs was an Army veteran. He was 37.
The driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of a Las Vegas hotel on New Year’s Day has been identified as an Army veteran who lived in Colorado Springs, multiple informed sources told Denver7 Investigates.
Those sources tell Denver7 the driver was Matthew Livelsberger, who has multiple Colorado Springs addresses associated to him. FBI agents were staking out one of those addresses on Marksheffel Road late Wednesday awaiting a search warrant.
Make that three coincidences
Denver7 adds this:
Late Wednesday, Denver7 Investigates learned that Livelsberger served at the same Army base as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspect in a New Orleans truck rampage hours earlier.
A lot of people serve in the Army. There is no reporting that Shamsud-Din Jabbar and Matthew Livelsberger served at the same base at the same time. Authorities and reporters are scouring the men’s social media accounts for evidence of motive.
If you were going to choose a metaphor for our current state of politics, a Tesla Cybertruck exploding and burning in front of a Trump Tower in a city where millions of Americans go each year to lose their money, is pretty spot on. pic.twitter.com/xOwXImUIgM
Authorities are investigating a Tesla Cybertruck explosion on Wednesday outside the Trump Las Vegas hotel in Nevada as a possible act of terror.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said it was investigating a fire at the entrance to the tower. The public was told to avoid the area, though the police noted the fire had been put out.
The driver pulled into the valet area of the hotel and the vehicle exploded, according to an official. The driver is apparently dead and, so far, the only casualty from the incident. Seven bystanders had minor injuries, authorities said.
Investigators do not know what caused the blast, such as whether something was wrong with the vehicle or whether something external prompted it. Determining what was behind the explosion is the key focus of the probe.
An official briefed on the probe told ABC News that the Tesla Cybertruck had a load of fireworks-style mortars onboard. Investigators are urgently working to determine a motive and whether the driver intended to set off an explosion and why.
I keep saying that reality is going to bite Trump eventually. I refuse to believe that his con game isn’t going to catch up with him and I don’t think for a moment that he’s got some kind of magic that transcends all reason. He’s a very lucky guy who happened into the political world at a time when celebrity, social media and right wing propaganda outlets were ascendant in our society and he exploited it like the grifter he is. But the cult he built is like all cults — it’s strong until it isn’t. And its strength is about to be tested.
The New Republic’s Robert McCoy took a look at the weird phenomenon as well as the possible reckoning ahead:
Consider these archetypal dispatches from the 2024 campaign trail. “A lot of people are happy to vote for [Trump] because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will,” an October New York Times “campaign notebook” entry observed. The following week, The Washington Postnoted of prospective Trump voters: “Some read between Trump’s lines about how he would govern, while others disregard parts of his past or present platform.”
Then there was the phenomenon Paul Krugman, the retiring Times columnist, dubbed “Trump-stalgia,” which could just as well have been called “Trump-nesia.” Most Americans are undoubtedly better off than they were four years ago, he wrote in May. “But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.” This sentiment held true through the election. As TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on November 9, citing internal Democratic polling, “It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.”
As the author writes, people just projected onto him whatever they wanted him to be regardless of the stupidity, the inconsistency, the hypocrisy or the incoherence. Pick one from column A and one from column B.
But the chimerical allure that helped propel Trump to the White House has an expiration date. He sold myriad, and often conflicting, fantasies to voters. In three weeks’ time, he’ll face reality. And many Trump voters will undoubtedly start to realize that he is not at all the person they thought they were voting for.
Already, there are two major contradictions emerging in the nascent Trump administration, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued in November. “The first centers on economic policy—or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself,” he wrote, noting that some Trump picks are proponents of unfettered capitalism while others are economic nationalists who want to “transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations.” The second contradiction, meanwhile, “centers on foreign policy—or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world.” The advocates of hard power versus the isolationists, essentially.
These diverse allies found common cause on the campaign trail in opposition to the left, but “when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos.” In other words, Trump will have to pick sides. In some ways, he’s already doing so based on the balance of his nominees: His Cabinet is shaping up to be rather interventionist and plutocratic.
Many cultists will find ways to rationalize these betrayals. They already are. But the activist right sees their influence with Trump waning and they are already working to wrest control of the movement from the tech-bro interlopers. Those are the people to keep your eyes on and they are more influential than people realize.
McCoy points out that there’s always some backlash in any new administration, asserting that “according to the well-demonstrated theory of thermostatic politics, public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of policy. ” But he says that if he overestimates his mandate (which is certainly is) it could produce a historically “fierce” backlash.
For example he observes that the draconian deportation plan could elicit a massive backlash. We’ve seen an awful lot of anecdotal evidence (and some polling as well) showing that people just didn’t think he’d actually deport anyone but the vicious criminals he insists are roaming on every street in America. It’s possible that he’ll just stage a few deportations of tattooed gang members, point to the already low crime numbers and say Mission Accomplished. But again, you have to wonder how his hardcore MAGA cultists will respond. They really wanted that mass deportation of immigrants. That Haitian Springfield story proved that.
I do think that prosecuting his enemies and mass pardoning the J6 rioters could have an effect though. The true believers will be on board but I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some of the slightly less cultist types who thought he was going to lower the price of eggs might start to see through his phony promises and wonder why he’s focusing on petty vengeance. If the Congress starts talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare with Elon and Vivek dominating the conversation I think the backlash will indeed be fierce.
If the Democrats and their allies have any tactical sense they will remind people of stuff like this:
Take his improbable vow to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, which he recently walked back in a Timeinterview, acknowledging that “this is trickier than he let on.” In the same interview, he also managed expectations about lowering the cost of groceries, saying doing so will be “hard” and, if he fails, he would not consider his presidency a failure. It’s a stark pivot from his September pledge: “Vote Trump, and your … grocery prices will come tumbling down.”
On those issues and more, Trump has, as a recent Timesheadline put it, promised the moon with “no word on the rocket.” On many issues, though, not only is there no rocket, but there are instead blueprints for a deep-sea submersible: Trump’s core policy proposals are poised to do the opposite of what he says, exacerbating the economic discontent he tapped into. Between his proposed tariffs, deportations, and tax cuts, Timereports that if Trump “enacts many of the policies he proposed on the campaign trail, voters may see prices continue to rise.”
This is one of the weird advantages Trump has because everyone knows he’s a pathological liar. The people who like him see that as a sign that he’s a smart politician who wisely tells people what they want to hear in order to get elected.They don’t believe him any more than the rest of us do but they think his threats and promises are good politics anyway. The question is whether what they actually get — this billionaires revolution — is what they thought they were getting:
Or, to return to Trump’s words in The Art of the Deal: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.” Trump has proven, in business and politics, that in fact he can con people for a very long time. But, come 2025, when he’s confronted with the reality of governing—and, one can hope, a reinvigorated opposition—Trump may finally be exposed to his newfound supporters as the huckster we’ve long known him to be.
We’ll see. Those swing and unreliable voters might be disappointed. Or they might just lose interest and leave the polarized country where it’s been stuck for almost a decade. I do hope that reality still means something — I have to. I just wish I was more sure that it will catch Trump before he does his worst.
Community Notes can’t keep up with the amount of MAGA misinformation about the New Orleans terror suspect. These three were flagged, but there are countless others.
Looks like 2025, will be much like 2024 for these MAGA misinformation accounts. pic.twitter.com/9NSkvw2yCB
At this point we have very limited information about the attack in New Orleans last night. It’s a horrific assault which the authorities are saying they don’t believe was done as a lone act of terrorism. The story is unfolding and very little is known as yet except for the fact that the perpetrator was an American from Texas whom they think was flying an ISIS flag. If you’d been on Elon’s hellhole for the past few hours — or watching Fox News — you would have been told that he was an illegal immigrant who had come over the border unlawfully in the last few days, among other lies.
I’m not going to speculate about what this is about but I wanted to alert everyone once more to the fact that Twitter is a cesspool of misinformation on any day but especially at times like these, much of it led by dishonest MAGA leaders. It’s a terrible space during any kind of emergency nowadays which is truly sad because it used to be so good.
BlueSky doesn’t have the scale but if you got there at least you won’t be confronted with a bunch of MAGA weirdos, foreign bots and racist miscreants flooding the zone with lies.
Footage of this year’s celebrations captured Donald and Melania Trump, running mate J.D. Vance (and his wife Usha) and partying MAGA supporters clapping and singing along to Village People’s “YMCA.”
He was there but he wasn’t having any fun. Probably because Lara Trump was singing.
And then there was this which angered Don Jr’s pals to no end:
Reporter: Why did you change your mind on H1B visas?
Trump: I didn’t change my mind. I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in. We’re going to… pic.twitter.com/Ot5LNMruyI
Many of the rubes won’t know about this or they’ll forgive him. But it’s caused a huge rift among the big MAGA grassroots leaders. It’s going to be a problem.
“I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country.” It takes a very stable genius to recognize other extraordinary people like RFK Jr. and foreign models.
Reporter: Why did you change your mind on H1B visas?Trump: I didn’t change my mind. I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in.
Days ago, Trump filed an amicus brief on his desire to rescue TikTok from the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that will likely ban the app in the U.S. on January 19. Even the Wall Street Journal found Trump’s argument preposterous. He wants the Court to treat him (a private citizen) as though he’s co-president with Joe Biden before being sworn in (Raw Story):
“The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good,” the board said, later adding: “Mr. Trump wants the Court to treat him as if he’s already President before he’s inaugurated.”
Trump for all intents and purposes is a “private citizen” until he’s inaugurated, the board countered. He is also in essence “asking the Justices to let him rewrite a law he doesn’t like,” it added.
Trump, the board said, “instructs the Court that he deserves this power because he won the election and is a wizard on social media. Really, that’s his claim.”
No kidding (from the brief): “President Trump is one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history.” Plus, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns…”
Who can argue with that?
Trump knows who’s boss
“Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” historian Timothy Snyder tells The Guardian. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”
“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.
“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”
Trump married his wives for their curb appeal. He married Musk for the money.
“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”
But then, Trump has no friends. Everything in his life is transactional. Now Musk is the biggest transactor in the room.
We’ve all wondered when Trump will die from his fast food diet. Maybe he’ll die from a broken heart when Elon dumps him.
People with higher profiles have warned what could happen to this country under Donald Trump if he were reelected to the White House. I did so myself in 2024 here and here and here. Those three posts all referenced Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” his celebration of selfless dedication, essentially, in public service by geeks more interested in mission than in money. Blasphemy!
In a few short weeks, America will embark on a journey into the unknown. Dave Neiwert published “Alt America” in 2017 about the rise of the eliminationist alt-right movement. Trumpism, an expression of that movement, seeks not only to eliminate non-white immigrants but those very civil servants who make the nation you know the nation you know.
Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein consider what it means that Trump 2.0 will be staffed with incompetents and cronies chosen more for their loyalty to one man than to stewardship of the republic that will be 250 years old in 18 months. What Trump and those backing him intend for this country is not new, inventive, or an improvement on popular sovereignty. They intend “an assault on the modern state as we know it” by figures committed to its undoing (New York Times gift link):
Eviscerating modern state institutions almost always clears a path for a different type of political order, one built on personal loyalties and connections to the ruler. The German sociologist Max Weber had a word for this type of regime: patrimonialism, based on the arbitrary rule of leaders who view themselves as traditional “fathers” of their nations and who run the state as a family business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the ruler’s “extended household.”
Social scientists thought that patrimonialism had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And for good reason: Such regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by the expert civil services that helped make modern societies rich, powerful and relatively secure.
But a slew of self-aggrandizing leaders has taken advantage of rising inequality, cultural conflicts and changing demography to grab power. The result has been a steep decline in the government’s ability to provide essential services such as health care, education and safety.
My gripe here is with patrimonialism, ten-dollar word for cronyism and/or nepotism.
Trump 2.0 will not actually downsize the alleged “deep state.” They will repurpose departments run by the sort of public servants Lewis met that are the “foundations of both public and private life” and make them serve Dear Leader’s and his billionaire buddies’ bottom lines.
Hanson and Kopstein conclude, “The threat we face is different, and perhaps even more critical: a world in which the rule of law has given way entirely to the rule of men.”
I’ve long described men like Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Koch network, and their ilk as members of the Midas cult. They believe like Midas that everything that might be turned into gold should be. Their bottomless greed, like Midas’s will kill the golden goose that brought them riches and bring them to ruin. But perhaps not before they ruin the rest of us. They will, as Hanson and Kopstein observe, destroy “the predictable enforcement of laws essential to modern capitalism.”
My warning to the kleptocrats and kakistocrats and to American voters who handed them the keys to our government is the timeless lesson of Midas: be careful what you wish for.
Kaecilius: What have you done? Dr. Stephen Strange: I made a bargain. Kaecilius: What is this? Dr. Stephen Strange: Well, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted. Eternal life as part of the One. You’re not gonna like it. [Kaecilius and his Zealots are sucked into the Dark Dimension] Dr. Stephen Strange: Yeah, you know, you really should have stolen the whole book because the warnings… The warnings come after the spells. [Wong laughs]
I think we may have found out why Trump is suddenly talking about territorial expansion. Somebody mentioned a little history over dinner and YMCA at MAL and he got all excited.
If you live with or care for someone with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), you’re likely familiar with the signs:
a pattern of grandiosity
a general lack of empathy
the constant need for admiration
These characteristics can intensify with age, particularly for someone who has dementia.
You’ll be glad to know that his minions are hard at work normalizing this lunacy:
Kayleigh: Could the American flag be adding another star in 2025? Trump's idea of making Canada great again by turning it into the 51st state is gaining some serious traction especially from Canadian citizens pic.twitter.com/tLsYBnwOS0
The NY Times published a fun feature called “11 Data Points and Discoveries That Surprised Us in 2024.” I thought this one was particularly pertinent to Democratic navel gazing about the election:
Special elections really were all about turnout, and thus meant little for November
Why were Democrats doing so well in special elections, even though polls showed Joe Biden doing so poorly? I collected and analyzed data on who had been voting in special elections, and this chart was my “eureka” moment. On the y-axis: how well Democrats fared in a special election, compared with the 2020 election result. On the x-axis: our estimates for the 2020 vote choice of the same special electorates, based on exactly who voted and our previous estimates for the likelihood that registered voters backed Mr. Biden in 2020. As you can see, there’s a decent one-to-one relationship, implying that these election results were mostly a function of turnout, not persuasion.
The biggest surprise, for me, wasn’t simply that there was a decent correlation between turnout and results. The surprise was how clearly it could be detected, given the paucity of data on these idiosyncratic, ultra-low-turnout elections.
Separate data showed Donald J. Trump doing very well with infrequent voters, the kind who may show up for presidential races but rarely for special elections.
The answer on special elections was clear: The aggregate Democratic advantage in these elections was simply a turnout advantage, and they didn’t mean much for Mr. Biden’s (or Kamala Harris’s) chances in November. — Nate Cohn
That’s one way of looking at it. I would also question whether the turnout advantage in the presidential is specific to Donald Trump or would apply to any Republican. We won’t know until he takes his final bow but my suspicions is that those infrequent voters are participating in American Idol: The President! not politics. Unless they can come up with another celebrity demagogue with Trump’s peculiar talents I’m not sure these results tell us anything more meaningful about presidential turnout.
What is meaningful is that Democrats are getting higher turnout in off years and special elections which means that those college educated suburban voters who habitually turn out may have made the full transition to the Democrats. After all, if their switch was all about Trump there’s no reason they couldn’t vote for Republicans in those elections. So the big question is really whether those “infrequent” voters will show up for some stiff like DeSantis or Vance. I wonder…
