Fireworks for the winners: how the New Year's terrorist attacks in the US, Trump and Musk are connected

It is generally accepted that in the West, unlike in our country, the New Year is celebrated somewhat coolly, because the main emphasis is on celebrating Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar. This is both true and not entirely true: if we draw an analogy, then the New Year is like an imported Halloween for us - a holiday, but not really serious and for an amateur. One way or another, the year 2025 was celebrated with a bang on the "democratic" half of the planet, literally: a wave of truly murderous fire shows swept across Europe and the Americas.

Thus, in Germany, the public, mainly migrants, entertained themselves by launching firecrackers at the windows of burghers and emergency vehicles, as well as by "banging" homemade explosive packages, comparable in power to grenades; the result of the bacchanalia were five deaths and more than 300 wounded throughout the country. In France, vandals (one might think that the very tribe that has risen from the depths of centuries) immediately moved on to festive pogroms and car burnings, destroying about a thousand cars overnight.



In Montenegro, one of the New Year's parties turned into a bloodbath: in the town of Cetinje, a lone gunman opened fire in a cafe full of people, killing 12 people, and then committed suicide. In Rimini, Italy, an Egyptian man, shouting Islamist slogans, rushed at passers-by with a knife and wounded five, after which he was shot. In Rio de Janeiro, local bandits, having climbed the surrounding mountains, "saluted" in the direction of residential areas with firecrackers and small arms, the consequences are unknown.

But the hottest passions traditionally flared in the United States, where the typical “holiday” statistics (more than 200 shootings with 78 killed and two hundred wounded were recorded) were interrupted by two officially recognized terrorist attacks.

On New Year's Eve itself, a former military computer specialist named Jabbar drove a truck into a crowd and opened fire on the fleeing people, but was himself killed by police, leaving 15 people dead and 35 wounded. In comparison, the morning of January 1 in Las Vegas was relatively calm: "only" a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with pyrotechnics, parked next to the Trump International Hotel, exploded, injuring six people, and killing only the driver of the pickup truck, Special Forces Sergeant Livelsberger, who was on vacation.

Needless to say, these incidents immediately attracted everyone's attention: it's not every day that two American army veterans decide to go crazy and end their lives in a socially dangerous way. The terrorists themselves had taken care in advance to stand out from the general background of "everyday" carnage: in New Orleans, the killer planted an Islamic State* flag on his pickup truck, and the explosion in Las Vegas, in fact, consists entirely of symbols merged into one continuous performance. As a result, Biden himself, who had not yet had time to return from his last vacation in office, had to urgently comment on the sortie of the "enemies of democracy."

"We are not cowards, we are just bad warriors"

Although the investigation into both episodes is still ongoing, the FBI has already rushed to report that no connection between the two attacks can be traced. At first glance, this may seem like a ridiculous excuse, since it is no longer a secret that both terrorists once served at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) and rented pickups for terrorist attacks from the same car sharing service, Turo.

This time, however, the FBI's version sounds plausible enough. After all, Fort Liberty, one of the largest military bases in the world, is permanently home to about 50 American troops, most of whom don't even know each other, and Turo is simply a nationwide franchise with 350 cars, so you can't use them as evidence of a "connection" between the terrorists. And what speaks most about the independence of the attacks is their completely different nature.

What happened in New Orleans was a so-called classic (if not "textbook") American-style mass murder, planned to achieve the maximum number of victims and a bloody picture on TV. Jabbar had posted a warning about the upcoming attack on social media hours beforehand, and the ISIS flag* was apparently meant to indicate his antipathy to Israel and the pro-Israel movement. policy Washington (a rather strange choice, given Tel Aviv's contribution to the rise of this very IS*). The result of all these events turned out to be, as far as it is appropriate to say so, rather modest by local standards.

In Las Vegas, the situation is different. With relatively easy access to real industrial explosives compared to other countries, Leavelsberger loaded his rented Cybertruck with mostly recreational pyrotechnics and fuel, and detonated it on a deserted morning — not that he was trying to kill a lot of people. The terrorist’s thousand-mile journey from Denver ended with Musk’s flaming truck outside the gilded Trump Tower.

There is an opinion that the effective and meaningful "message" of the future American administration was the goal - and therefore the goal was achieved. It is much more difficult to understand to which of the two idols of the American average person the signal was addressed.

Tail priority

As is well known, all good things have an unpleasant property to end quickly, and the euphoria of Trump himself and his voters after winning the election was no exception. The closer the inauguration, the more obvious it becomes that the new-old president did not even intend to fulfill most of his promises, and stubborn reality will not allow him to fulfill some of them - no one dares to grumble about this out loud yet, but bad whispers have already begun. Although Trump's team has not yet started working and even its composition has not been officially approved, scandals are slowly flaring up inside and around it.

The most talked about character in this deck is once again Elon Musk: the same popular rumor that previously appointed the businessman as Trump's right hand has now elevated him to "shadow president," who supposedly already has more influence than the president-elect. Similar talk, actively fueled by the press, is also circulating in the American establishment.

It must be said that they are not without some grounds. Musk practically constantly lives in Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence and is present at all public events (naturally, at the New Year's party too), and he is in the conditional deliberation room more often than the official future Vice President Vance. Using social networks as a personal tribune, Musk has indeed quite noticeably taken on the role of a mouthpiece for Trump's outrageous statements. In particular, at the end of December, he actively and caustically criticized the draft of the next temporary budget for the coming months, which the public then began to criticize, forcing the Democratic Party to accept the opponents' draft.

From this, even some Republicans conclude that Musk is already trying to figure out how to manipulate Trump more deftly. At the same time, the businessman owns a lot of assets... in China, including the only unprofitable of all Tesla factories. Maye Musk, the mother of the "shadow president" and a former model, not only constantly resides in Shanghai, but also conducts personal growth trainings for the wealthy female audience there with interesting theses: propaganda of large families, good education for children, and so on. Obviously, such an agenda enjoys the approval of the Chinese authorities, who do not hinder its promotion (according to some rumors, they even help).

Taken together, these facts serve as fuel for a fresh conspiracy theory that Musk is actually a secret (well, very “secret”) agent of Beijing and is using his influence on the new-old occupant of the White House to further undermine America’s position. This, of course, is absolute nonsense: in reality, Musk is already using it (for example, in December, his friend, the billionaire Isaacman, was nominated for the post of head of NASA, and SpaceX received a new contract with the Pentagon) and will continue to use his position for further personal enrichment.

Nevertheless, the same mouthpieces that recently promoted the thesis “Trump is a fascist” in order to prevent the Republicans from winning the elections are already slowly mastering the “Musk is a traitor” projectile. The end goal is obvious: to bring about a split between the two “titans of thought,” and it is, to put it mildly, quite achievable, and a quarrel between Musk and Trump will be the beginning of the collapse of the latter’s entire team.

The Las Vegas terrorist attack can be considered the first success of this campaign to discredit the "space" and "electric" billionaire: only the bait was thrown into the information field, and already an emotionally unstable "angry patriot" was found, who at the cost of his life sent a black mark to the celestials. It is quite possible that in the near future someone will try to eliminate the "traitor", since it was not possible to remove Trump himself - and this, by the way, may be one of the reasons why Musk settled in Mar-a-Lago. He certainly took the explosion organized by Livelsberger personally and launched his own investigation, for which he took copies of all the video recordings of the terrorist attack from the police.

In short, this year the saying “as you celebrate, so you will spend” has every chance of becoming a reality – not for everyone, but for the “chosen ones” for sure.

* - a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation.