Snapshot: Lying About New Orleans

Donald Trump's exploitation of the New Year's carnage is a warning

After the deadly attack on Bourbon Street. (Photo by Michael DeMocker via Getty Images)

The deadly reality of a driver plowing his pickup truck through crowds of revelers celebrating New Year’s on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street is bad enough. But Donald Trump—just minutes after Fox News erroneously reported that the suspect’s truck crossed the U.S. border in Texas “two days ago”—exploited this tragedy to fuel more hate toward migrants by blaming “criminals coming in” to America.

Never mind that Fox retracted its false report within 90 minutes yesterday, stating that the rental truck crossed the border two months ago and was not driven by the suspect. Never mind that officials soon revealed that the driver who killed 15 people and injured dozens more was a Texas-born U.S. citizen and an Army veteran.

Those facts were not useful to Trump or his sycophants. They didn’t wait for accurate, reliable information. They knew what narrative they wanted to spread. “Shut the border down!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly posted after the initial Fox report.

After the truth was knowable, Trump was not about to walk back his comments. Unsurprisingly, he doubled down. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” Trump spewed on his Truth Social platform. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”

What strikes me about this story is not just that Trump continued to spread lies after the facts came in. It’s that he was so quick to exploit the tragic attack, then aggressively asserted his original truthfulness. I can barely type the madness he posted early Thursday morning: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”

This sequence of events is a warning. This deranged, vengeful man—who is determined to blame Democrats, the Justice Department, the FBI and migrants crossing the border for all of the nation’s ills—will make snap judgements that fit his narrative. He will rely on sycophants ready to pursue his hateful agenda, even when it means ignoring or burying knowable facts that contradict his narrative. We also have every reason to expect that he will concoct events to justify his dark plots.

Imagine an FBI led by someone like Kash Patel. Do you think he will pursue the truth wherever it leads? Or will he seek scapegoats to appease his boss? Suffice to say, this strategy will make us all less safe.

This story is also a warning for all the ways that we rely on data to understand our world and its challenges. Can we count on accurate information if the crime rate rises under Trump? Can we rely on—indeed find—climate data from a regime pushing the lie that climate change is a hoax? What about credible public health data during another deadly virus outbreak or after the removal of a vaccine?

We all have the task to check and double-check sources to ensure the information is reliable. We need to support organizations that are capturing measurable data on critical issues. We need to speak out when it’s clear that Trump and his henchmen are spreading false narratives to justify their authoritarian mission. This is what democracy demands to oppose a regime that will work tirelessly to convince the public that its ruler is never wrong.

One more thing: After the tragic event, President Joe Biden noted that "the investigation is continuing to be active, and no one should jump to conclusions." He promised to keep the country "fully, contemporaneously informed."

Inform the public: That’s what a democratic president does.

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