Police checkpoints on and around Bourbon Street, after a vehicle plowed into New Year crowds at a tourist district local authorities said in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 1, 2025. | Source: Anadolu / Getty

Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn into office yet, and already he’s giving us a glimpse at what we’re in for over the next four years: lies, unmitigated xenophobia and a glaring lack of media literacy that would make anything to come out of the media look like “fake news” to anyone whose critical thinking capacity and ability to discern factual information are virtually non-existent. (So, Trump and your average Trump supporter.)

Just hours after a man drove a pickup truck into New Year’s Eve celebrators in New Orleans, killing 10 people and injuring many more, Trump took to social media to let everyone know the news vindicated claims he made during his campaign, the entirety of which he spent damning migrants (who he believes have murderous violence embedded in their “genes”) and bloviating about a rise in violent crime in America that, according to all reputable crime databases, does not exist. (More on that in a few.)

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump said on his truth-averse website, Truth Social, according to the New York Times. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”

“The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!” Trump added.

Yeah — what Trump should have done was wait for the investigation to yield any real information on the suspect at all before jumping to the assumption that a non-white terrorist must be a criminal who came into the country illegally.

As it turns out, the suspect, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, who was killed during a shoot-out with police following the attack, was a U.S. citizen from Texas, and a veteran of the U.S. Army. So, regardless of what Jabbar’s ideology was or what the motivation was behind his heinous attack, we know that he was a naturally-born citizen who was radicalized right here in the U.S. of A. He was a home-grown terrorist much like the mob of MAGA supporters who tried to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf on Jan. 6 — or better yet — much like Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who gunned down 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York, and left a manifesto that showed he is a believer of the same white nationalist Great Replacement Theory that Trump and many of his supporters, including GOP officials, also adhere to.

Now, according to the Times, “Some early reports about the attack said the truck was driven across the border from Mexico into the United States,” but that turned out to be false, and, at any rate, it’s no excuse for a supposed leader who will be the next sitting president spreading misinformation because he’s a moron who, despite his constant bemoaning of the “fake news media,” reacts immediately to every media headline he comes across that says exactly what he wants to be true. This is no different than when Trump went on a national debate stage and repeated debunked nonsense about Haitians abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, despite the fact that every Springfield law enforcement official, including its Republican mayor, reported that there was no evidence that it was happening.

We didn’t actually need more evidence that Trump is the living embodiment of the “fake news” he complains about, but he keeps giving us more and more to point to, including his oft-repeated, provably false claim that “the crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

Actually, we have already reported on how crime data doesn’t match Trump’s talking points:

Violent crime in America has virtually done nothing but decline since the early 1990s, and crime analysts report that U.S. crime, in general, is currently at a 50-year low. But Republicans continue to ignore the explicitly clear databases of the FBI and local law enforcement agencies —the same databases where they get the Black-on-Black crime statistics they intentionally misinterpret in the most racist ways possible—so they can keep hammering away at the same stale false narrative that crime, especially in the Black community, is rising under Democratic leadership faster than Trump rose for a power fist-appropriating photo-op immediately after getting shot at.

From CNN:

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”

The truth is, since the first time Trump was sworn into the White House eight years ago, we’ve seen easily debunked propaganda spewed from the Oval Office “at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” And now we can look forward to another four years of the same.

Sad.

SEE ALSO:

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