A small update on the Cybertruck incident in Vegas, since I discussed it in today’s Backchannel. The 37-year-old active-duty soldier in the vehicle apparently shot himself in the head moments before the car ignited. He was also, according to his uncle, a big Trump supporter. Needless to say (or I hope it’s needless to say), this makes the motive for this incident pretty hard to make sense of. Given the apparent suicide and other outlandish parts of what happened it seems obvious that mental health issues likely played some role. But this goes a bit beyond making bad decisions or having a general suicidal ideation. Even in the context of some distorted reasoning, what was the message? What was the point? I’ve seen a number of people propose that the dead soldier may have been angry about Trump’s new fealty to Musk. On its face this struck me as the kind of over-ornate theory you’d come up with if you’re spending too much time on social media and had too much time on your hands. But the truth is I haven’t been able to come up with any more plausible theory.

It’s always good to remember that people who rent a car, drive it from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas and then light the car on fire and shoot themselvs in the head probably aren’t thinking in very linear ways or ways that are going to make sense to the rest of us. But it’s still pretty hard to figure.

For years there’s been a running conversation in the United States about whether the country is heading towards a second Civil War. That conversation often stumbles on the fact that America’s profound divides today don’t line up on any clear regional lines, despite what the maps of presidential election results might seem to show. Divisions are at best intra-regional. So any kind of replay of the 1860s is highly unlikely. But of course plenty of civil wars either had no clear regional breakdown or at least don’t start with one — the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Syrian Civil War. Before going further I should note that as a general matter I’m a “no” on this question of “are we headed to a second American civil war?” But events yesterday and those of last month suggest the possibility of something more realistic and still ominous.

Let’s quickly review the details: yesterday in New Orleans we had what appears to be an ISIS-inspired lone wolf terrorist attack. The FBI is now discounting initial suspicions that others might be involved. Events like these happened with some frequency in the U.S. for a number of years. But there’s been some respite, more or less since the Pandemic. Then a Tesla Cybertruck exploded in front of a Trump building in Las Vegas. The driver was killed and the car appeared to be filled with high-powered fireworks and gas canisters. It’s still not clear what this incident was about. That’s not remotely how you’d build a car bomb if you wanted to injure anyone. But it certainly doesn’t seem like an accident either.