Deadline Poet / January 14, 2025

Terrorist Attack in New Orleans

Calvin Trillin
Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans after the terrorist attack.(Matthew Hinton / Getty)
Trump ties the attack to undocumented immigrants and Joe
Biden’s “open border” policy.—News reports

Jabbar was from Houston—that’s Texas, in fact.
He crossed in his truck a state line, not a border.
And Beaumont, in Texas, was where he was born.
Are mass deportations of Texans in order?

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Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

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In solidarity,

The Editors

The Nation

Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin is The Nation’s “deadline poet.”

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