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The Green Beret who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck and shot himself in front of the Trump International hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day left a series of suicide notes on a badly burned cellphone that police recovered from the vehicle. In these notes, he stated that it was his intention to send America a “wake-up call” with his action, because he felt that the country was “headed toward collapse.” He explained that he pulled this “stunt with fireworks and explosives” because “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence.”
And images. The image of the Cybertruck in flames in front of a Trump-branded property has already imprinted itself on the American psyche.
“Why did I do it now?” asked this active-duty soldier who had completed several combat tours in Afghanistan. “I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Up until this time, he had concealed his mental state and PTSD so he could remain in the Special Forces.
The man praised President-elect Trump and urged people to rally around Trump and Elon Musk, and added that citizens should “try peaceful means first but be prepared to fight” to get Democrats completely out of the federal government and out of the military.1
The Green Beret’s action occurred a few hours after another US Army veteran used a Ford F-150 Lightning (electric) truck to run down New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing at least fourteen and injuring another thirty before being shot dead in a gunfight with police. The killer in New Orleans was inspired by ISIS, pledged allegiance to ISIS in a series of videos posted to Facebook just before the attack, and carried an Islamic State flag with him during the rampage. He had first contemplated killing his own family, but decided it would be better to justify his impotent rage and death drive in service to “the war between believers and disbelievers.”
A 2010 article in the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire called on future adherents to use motor vehicles “to mow down the enemies of Allah,” but the practice didn’t take off until a few years later, when the Islamic State began to promote it widely. In 2017, a man inspired by ISIS drove a pickup truck onto a biking and running path by the Hudson River, killing at least eleven people, leading to the installation of 1,500 metal bollards in the most visited spots in New York City. Rental trucks and terrorist attacks have a long history, but in recent months, ISIS has increased its calls for casual supporters to engage in low-tech, mass-casualty ramming attacks against random innocents.
Immediately after the attack on New Year’s Day in New Orleans, Donald Trump (never one to let a catastrophe go untweeted) mistakenly labeled the ISIS-inspired attacker an immigrant, one of the hoards of criminals and miscreants streaming over the border into the US. Trump did this in order to say “I told you so,” pointing out that he had warned us that the immigrants coming into this country are largely criminals, perpetrating horrendous crimes here while simultaneously stealing jobs from Real Americans. But the mass murderer in New Orleans was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, and was a veteran of the US Army. Elon Musk’s first response to the Las Vegas attack was to assure everyone that the fire was definitely not caused by any malfunction in his product.
How many other disturbed individuals will follow this inauguration of the Trump/Musk era with further acts of suicidal pyrotechnic cruelty and inchoate, senseless carnage? Let us hope the baleful events of Day 1 of 2025 will act as an inoculation rather than an incitement.
1. Jacey Fortin, Dave Philipps, and Jesus Jiménez, “Soldier in Tesla Blast Had PTSD and Feared U.S. ‘Collapse,’ Officials Say,” The New York Times, January 3, 2025.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.