Following pressure from the Swedish government, Trump reluctantly took to Twitter on Sunday to clarify that his comments on a made-up Swedish terror attack were, as was obvious, a complete fiction.
Trump’s comments at the rally raised eyebrows because Sweden had not suffered any horrible terror attack during the time Trump seemed to suggest it had:
“You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”
Instead, Trump said what he really meant to say was that there were Muslims in Sweden causing a surge in crime - something which, itself, is based on right-wing lies.
My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2017
As the New York Times reported today, nobody is more shocked to hear about “soaring” immigrant crime in Sweden than…Sweden.
Henrik Selin, political scientist and deputy director of the Swedish Institute, a state agency dedicated to promoting Sweden globally, said he was puzzled by Mr. Trump’s remarks.
“I do not have a clue what he was referring to,” he said in a telephone interview. “Obviously, this could be connected to the fact that there has been a lot of negative reporting about Sweden, since Sweden has taken in a lot of refugees.”
Naturally, Steve Bannon’s white nationalist website, Breitbart, is at the center of this racist propaganda smear against immigrants in Europe.
Breitbart News, the right-wing website once led by Stephen K. Bannon, now Mr. Trump’s senior strategist, has published numerous stories alleging that migrants have been responsible for a surge in crime and for a wave of sexual assaults. Swedish officials have said that their statistics do not justify such sweeping assertions, and that the country has a high number of sexual assault reports, relative to other European countries, because more victims come forward, not because there is more violence.
As this sad tale of Trump conveying a falsehood because he misheard about it on cable news demonstrates, the president is increasingly ignoring his intelligence briefings and opting for more tv watching. Sources in the White House have privately expressed concern about the 70-year-old former reality tv star’s addiction to Fox News. Advisors told reporters that he wakes up super early each morning in order to catch any mention of his name on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, then retires to his residence early each night so he can watch Fox News. Already this has led him to some truly delusional decisions and is responsible for a number of his Twitter meltdowns.
It’s earned him the title “cable news consumer-in-chief.” Not exactly a comforting moniker for the leader of the free world. And these lies Trump gets from Fox have real-world consequences. Unlike the rest of the white 70-year-olds who watch Fox News, Trump uses the propaganda network to further his bigoted agenda leading to actual suffering. For the sake of his victims, his staff needs to curtail his tv watching.
Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images
