Law enforcement sources confirmed to local news outlets that the electric vehicle was rented from Turo, the vehicle-sharing service that was also used in the New Orleans attack on the same day. There, suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar used the Turo app to rent an electric Ford pickup truck used in that attack in the early hours of New Year’s Day, which killed 15 and injured dozens more.
Firmly firmly firmly onboard the “this attack was not genuinely intended to do damage” train. Either this will end up (officially) being an “unfortunate accident” where some dude was just gonna go blow shit up in the desert and was staying at a trump hotel on his way there, and flicked his cigarette butt the wrong direction; or this dude’s FBI-assigned “here’s how to make a bomb” radicalization agent trained him wrong as a joke so that this could be used as a cybertruck & trump hotel ad.
Or his FBI handler loaded up the truck and told him “Drive this to the Trump casino in Vegas, don’t ask any questions.”
Wanting to blow shit up in the desert would be an Occam’s razor explanation for having petrol cans and fireworks, and I could see a cybertruck guy being stupid enough to carry those things in a truck with an infamously electrified body. On that same tier I could see it being a spectacular suicide, like an obnoxious version of self-immolation with the most attention-grabbing vehicle he could rent.
There is some fucking hamfisted “the ford electric truck killed all these people” “the cybertruck saved everyone” “the brown dude was an evil terrorist” “forget about shooting CEOs” messaging being hammered into the collective subconscious. Hypernormalization marches on.
We’re gonna find out motor companies are actually radicalizing people to carry out terror attacks using their competitor’s vehicle for the sole purpose of smearing it