Hours later, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, killing one person and injuring others. At the time of writing, it was unknown if the two attacks were connected.

The New Orleans terrorist, Shamshud-din Jabbar, was a U.S. Army veteran from Houston, Texas. He worked in IT at Deloitte. Having initially suspected he had accomplices, the police later said they believed he had acted alone.

On Truth Social, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump repeated his previous claim that “the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country.”

It’s undeniable that there’s a terrorism threat from the collapse of U.S. border controls. There have been several reported instances of ISIS-affiliated terrorists crossing America’s southern border. But Jabbar was born in Texas.

For years now, America has told itself that Islamic terrorism is a European problem, in particular when it comes to home-grown Islamists. Now Americans have been brought up hard against the evidence that this is their problem as well.

Just as in Britain and elsewhere in the West, a curious state of denial and amnesia has afflicted America every time an Islamist attack takes place. There was the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the attack at Ohio State University in 2016, and the bike path massacre in New York City in 2017. The response to every such attack is shock and disbelief, as if it’s come out of the blue.

Jabbar wasn’t the first radicalized Muslim army veteran. In 2009, a former U.S. Army major, Nidal Hasan, murdered 13 people on the military base at Fort Hood. Nor was New Orleans the first vehicular attack. In 2006, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove a rented Jeep into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.