On Saturday, Donald Trump once again confused the international community at large by referencing a terrorist attack in Sweden that never took pace. The statement was made at a campaign rally for his next term in office – a campaign that won’t start for another three years at the very least – a campaign he should NOT be concerned with when he has such a big job to be doing. No standing president has ever begun their reelection campaign so early.
At his rally, the So-Called Ruler of the United States (the SCROTUS, if you will) was trying to defend ghis travel ban by alluding to terrorist attacks around the world. Sure, he could have picked any real terrorist attack in history, but instead Donald Trump decided to talk about one that was totally, indisputably made up. Here is our ever-so-eloquent leader, talking about something that never happened:
“When you look at what’s happening in Germany, when you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden – Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they’re having problems like they never thought possible.”
The Swedish government itself has been wasting its own resources trying to determine what Trump was talking about. Which was?
Well, it seems that Donald Trump get;s his new from one of the mist dis-reputable sources on the entire internet: InfoWars
“They took in large numbers,” of course, refers to refugees. This part is actually true – Sweden’s population is currently 8% refugees, reflecting a policy of forward-thinking compassion on the part of the Swedish government that stands in sharp contrast to the xenophobic rhetoric that carried a man who walks, talks, and quacks like a fascist into America’s highest office.
The increasingly infamous imaginary “Sweden Incident” is sending defenders of the big mean scream machine – by extent defenders of every claim that might as well be constructed by a predictive text interface that drops from his mouth – scrambling to find some sort of actual events that could be retrofitted to believably be what he was talking about. The results have kicked up a rumor that Sweden has experienced an increase in sexual assault since taking in large numbers of refugees. This is also false. Such numbers have actually gone down. Of course, either way such a statistical change wouldn’t be something that happened on the seventeenth.
The only source of news about Sweden it seems the Gaslighter in Chief could have gotten his news from is an article titled “Second Swedish Police Officer Blows The Whistle On Migrant Crime Cover-Up“, from InfoWars, the biggest trolling fake news website on the internet. Before you click, remember that every statement in this article can be verified as false, and it only links back to its own website. The fake article describes a wave of chaos sweeping through Sweden because of the people they’ve taken in, framing a made-up scenario where people are being driven back to the war zones they fled from. It would be nice if it were all in good fun, but it’s too hateful and destructive for that.
This isn’t even the first time the orange menace has referenced InfoWars. His infamously false claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for three million illegal voters also came straight from the fake news website.
When he refused to attend standard briefings from American intelligence agencies before taking office, Trump made the dubious claim that he didn’t need to go because he had superior sources for information on hand. Looks like this is what he meant!