American Battleground: Trump’s appetite for revenge — and the limits he might face

When the shiny white pickup turns off of Canal Street, the new year is just hours old and none of the revelers in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter can know what is coming their way.

When the shiny white pickup turns off of Canal Street, the new year is just hours old and none of the revelers in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter can know what is coming their way. Neither can the police officers who race toward the screams of those being run down as the vehicle plows through the crowd. The assault will leave 14 people dead and many more injured, including two officers shot by the armed driver, and that gunman dying in the street from return fire. Investigators call it a terrorist attack inspired by ISIS. Within hours, Fox News reports the truck crossed the US border with Mexico two days earlier. The story seems to fit perfectly into the far-right narrative of violent extremists sneaking into the country in a flood of undocumented immigrants. President-elect Donald Trump, a longtime Fox fan, rapidly takes to the internet to post about “criminals coming in” from other countries. He expands on the thought over the next 24 hours, and other prominent Republicans echo his words. “I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump writes on Truth Social, laying his accusations at the door of President Joe Biden’s administration. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.” But Fox’s initial report was wrong. The network walked it back about an hour and a half later, with an on-air correspondent saying, “Our sources now tell Fox that that truck from Eagle Pass, Texas, did not cross two days ago. It crossed on November 16, and the identification of the driver that crossed the border does not appear to be the shooter.” The gunman was a US citizen and an Army veteran. The truck was rented. The border crossing was two months earlier and had no connection to the attack. But Trump steams on, implying the horrific actions of a radicalized American were somehow the result of Biden’s immigration policies. As incoming president, Trump could have easily requested the facts from investigators before he made even the first erroneous claim. How Trump views the concept of truth has been the subject of many discussions. New York Times reporter and CNN political analyst Maggie Haberman, who has been on the billionaire’s trail for years, once suggested Trump sees truth as whatever he can get away with. When media fact-checkers point out Trump’s lies, a common response among voters who like Trump is the facts don’t always tell the truth … he does. In other words, many of his supporters fully comprehend the statistics, experts and media reports telling them crime is low, inflation is under control and undocumented immigrants have not taken over the country. But those facts clash with the truth of their feelings: Crime feels scary, prices feel too high, and societal changes in their communities — which many areas have undeniably experienced — can feel deeply unsettling.