On Thursday, Maggie Haberman predicted that Donald Trump will continue to fabricate the New Orleans truck attack into a story to support his anti-immigrant agenda in the coming weeks as he takes office.
“What’s behind it all is that Trump has a pretty firm anti-immigrant box that fits most things,” a prominent New York Times reporter told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “This is no exception.”
“They are tripling. His communications director, Steven Cheung, sent me a statement loosely linking this case to cases of migrants crossing the border linked to ISIS.”
“The number was relatively small compared to the number of border crossings every day,” she added.
“But I think we’re going to see President-elect Trump continue to push this forward. Because he said. He’ll seal the borders on day one, and I think we’ll see him use it. This is the reason.”
The journalist said he was “not surprised” by the directive taken by President Trump despite the fact that there is still “so much we don’t know” about the attacker who drove down Bourbon Street in a truck on New Year’s Day, killing at least 14 people.
The FBI is investigating this incident as an act of terrorism.
On Wednesday, before the FBI publicly identified the suspect, Trump linked the attack to immigration failures.
However, when the suspect was identified as Shamsud Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas, Trump did not back down and continued his lengthy speech opposing “open borders.”
President Trump’s press secretary Cheung provided HuffPost with a statement similar to what Haberman described when asked whether the president-elect would change his potentially misleading comments after identifying the suspect.
“President Trump has rightly emphasized that criminals crossing our borders have committed some of the most heinous crimes we have ever seen in the history of this country. “This is a statement based on facts,” he said, adding, “It is also true that radical Islamic terrorism and its twisted ideology have infiltrated our country and infected those who seek to spread hatred and violence.”
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Elected Republicans also used the violence as an opportunity to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies and tout the incoming administration’s immigration plans.
Trump, who made undocumented immigration a key issue in his presidential campaign, pledged large-scale deportation efforts and immigration crackdown upon taking office.
