"You look at what's happening in Germany, 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. You look at what's happening in Brussels, you look at what's happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice, take a look at Paris."This was a message sent across the world by President Donald Trump during his campaign rally in Florida on February 18, 2017. (Campaign rally? Mr. President, the election is over. You won. The next election is not until 2020. You need to stop seeking constant validation from your most loyal supporters, get a grip on reality and start doing your job! Mass meetings with cheering crowds glorifying a leader sends chills down the spine of most people with any grasp of history.)
As it turns out, this particular section of the strange word salad that tends to come out of the President's mouth whenever he speaks was not actually meant to suggest that Sweden had suffered a terrorist attack the day before. Mentioning Brussels, Nice and Paris, cities which actually suffered terrorist attacks, immediately afterwards was misleading and ugly rhetoric, but let's cut the President some slack and attribute that to a short-circuit in a disorganised mind. What he meant to say was not literally "you look at what's happening last night in Sweden" but rather "yesterday, I looked at what's happening in Sweden".
The official explanation, given through (what else?) a tweet sent out on Sunday, made it clear that his statement was based on a Fox News interview, in the the Friday episode of "Tucker Carlson Tonight", with filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who made a film called "Stockholm Syndrome" about the alleged problem with rising crime in Sweden. According to the filmmaker, a sharp rise in rape and violent crime in Sweden should be attributed to the large number of Muslim immigrants that have been admitted into the country in recent years.
First, the film in question is strongly biased, clearly designed to make a political point, and many of the claims in the "documentary" by Horowitz have been contested and called out as falsehoods. Even its fundamental premise, that the crime rate in Sweden is increasing, is false. I live in Sweden, and I can tell you it's still a very peaceful country compared to most others. Statistics show a slight increase in computer fraud in recent years, but the rates of other types of crime, including violence and rape, have remained more or less steady (and low) over the past decade, despite a sharp increase in the number of refugees who have been admitted into the country. What small crime rate increases you can find are not linked to immigrants. There has been a recent and problematic increase in gun-related violence and homicide in specific neighborhoods of a handful of cities, but while that is troublesome for those particular regions, it amounts to little more than glitches in the national statistics. Besides, the problems in those regions are definitely not caused by Muslim terrorists, nor by recently arrived refugees. Most of it can be attributed to organized gang-related crime without any particular political or religious ties. But let's not dwell on the abundance of errors in the film by Horowitz. It is a matter of debate to contest its claims, and that is what politics is about.
The troubling issue is that the President of the United States is now openly admitting to getting his information straight from Fox News, and apparently believes everything he watches on that channel without questioning it. This, when you think about it, is very, very frightening. Fox News, like many other news outlets, has a clear political agenda, and some of their reporting is strongly biased to the right, but the really scary part is that President Trump uses one random TV interview as his only source, without even naming it, and goes all-in on its possibly (in this case definitely) biased message in a public address. This kind of behavior is reckless, dangerous and unacceptable.
Dear President Trump: Stop lying! You are the President, and while I understand you want to be a different kind of president than tradition dictates, you need to grow up. Please learn to check your often dubious and incorrect sources before you embarrass yourself in public. It would be best if you learned to use written sources, but I realize it might be a stretch to change your habits and learn new skills at your age. However, you can still ask your advisers to check your facts and let them suggest what might or might not be appropriate to say as the President of the United States of America. When you say these silly things, these pathetic and transparent lies that simply don't make any sense at all to anyone but your most loyal domestic followers, the world laughs at you and regards you with disrespect as a stupid, scary clown. You need to bring yourself to watching at least some of the news channels you are dismissing as "fake news" and "enemies of the American people" (in your most disturbing scary clown tweet so far), because you desperately need to learn to get the big picture. If you keep letting only a few right-leaning news channels determine your view on reality, and dismiss out of hand all sources that disagree with your much too narrow and uneducated world view, you will never be fit to rule.
