Presidential transitions are inherently periods of uncertainty as the leadership of the federal government changes hands, but the deadly attacks to start 2025, coupled with two attempts on the president-elect’s life during the campaign, are poised to cast a shadow over Trump’s swearing-in festivities in Washington.

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“There’s always a significant security presence at inaugurations,” Daniel Byman, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program, told the Washington Examiner. “But I think given both the history of assassination attempts against President-elect Trump, and the recent, at least one terrorist attack in New Orleans, I think it’s going to be even higher.

On the same day Trump’s inaugural committee announced that the president-elect would hold a rally at the Capitol One Arena on Jan. 19, days before he takes the oath of office for a second time on the steps of the Capitol, Byman said there would be security concerns not only around Trump’s safety but that of his crowd.

“Part of it is the number of police, part of it is the number of security barriers you have to go through the closer you get to the president-elect and other dignitaries,” he added. “They’ll also be an effort to push the perimeter out. There’ll be less mobility within the area as a way to try to increase control over the space that’s closest to the president-elect.”

More generally, transitions are a vulnerable time for security, according to Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service. 

“Most notably, the 9/11 Commission found that the abbreviated transition for George W. Bush contributed to personnel delays affecting coordination that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks,” Boyd told the Washington Examiner.

That is why organizations, including the Center for Presidential Transition, called on Congress to pass laws requiring “coordination across incoming and outgoing administrations to address national security vulnerabilities,” Boyd said.

Those laws include the Presidential Transition Act, which requires the outgoing administration to provide a classified security briefing to the president-elect as soon as possible after the election and to offer the incoming team the opportunity to undertake tabletop exercises with their outgoing counterparts, in addition to encouraging the FBI to quickly process background checks for high-level national security nominees so they can start as soon as they are confirmed.

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act also requires the FBI to offer background checks for transition officials so federal agencies, such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, can provide classified briefings before inauguration.

Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, similarly underscored the importance of coordination, contending decisions made by outgoing administrations can have repercussions for the incoming one. For example, Kumar cited George H.W. Bush’s deployment of U.S. troops to Somalia in 1992, some of whom were killed during a 17-hour reprisal attack by Somalia soldiers who were seeking to capture warlord Gen. Mohammed Aidid in 1993 during former President Bill Clinton’s term.

“Look at all the things that are going on right now that are national security threats,” Kumar told the Washington Examiner. “There are a lot of things that are that are going on that you need to be able to deal with immediately, like Ukraine and dealing with Israel and Gaza, and so it requires that you have a strong, a strong transition in the national security area.”

Trump’s transition eased some security concerns last December when it signed memorandums of understanding with the White House and the Justice Department so the president-elect’s team could start conducting its own agency reviews.

But Trump has also created new concerns by amplifying false misinformation about the New Orleans attack, including by connecting it to President Joe Biden‘s “border policy” even though suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a U.S.-born citizen, an Army veteran from Texas who was employed by prestigious consulting firm, Deloitte. Jabbar is accused of killing 15 people in the city’s nightlife precinct of Bourbon Street by plowing into them with a pick-up truck bearing an ISIS flag. Jabbar died in a shootout with police.

“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”

Meanwhile, Biden was criticized for stoking speculation that the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks were linked in his address to the nation from Camp David on New Year’s Day before clarifying that they were not a day later.

“They’ve established that the attacker was the same person who planted the explosives in those ice coolers in two nearby locations,” Biden said. “They assessed he had a remote detonator in his vehicle to set off those two ice chests.”

While Biden has been repeatedly briefed on the attacks, including a briefing in the White House Situation Room on Thursday, Trump’s transition team has pointed to them as a reason why the Senate has to expeditiously confirm the president-elect’s national security and intelligence nominees, including controversial picks former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as his DNI and Kash Patel as his FBI director. Senators will now also likely ask Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) about terrorism during her hearing to become the next homeland security secretary, in addition to the border.

“This is why getting President Trump’s Cabinet in is so important,” Trump national security adviser nominee Michael Walz told Fox News on Thursday. “This is a moment in transition of vulnerability and President Trump is going to project because he is a leader of strength. That narrative that we project on day one will be just important, and that’s having our people in place.”