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Permalink Reply by Bmichael on
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Trump Says, 'Look What's Happening In Sweden.' Sweden Asks, 'Wait, What?'
February 19, 20171:11 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
In the span of a single sentence, President Trump managed to flummox a nation.
"We've got to keep our country safe," Trump said at a campaign-style rally Saturday in Melbourne, Fla. "You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden — Sweden, who would believe this?"
Swedes, in turn, answered Trump's question with a question of their own: "Wait — what?"
On Friday night — the night in question — a few things did, in fact, happen in Sweden. A Stockholm newspaper helpfully laid out a few of them:
- Technical problems threatened to derail a performance by singer Owe Thörnqvist.
- Harsh weather in the north of the country shut down a road.
- A high-speed chase in Stockholm ended with the driver under arrest.
Aftonbladet listed a few more, to be sure — the trouble is, none of those events fits what Trump implied by including Sweden in a list of places that had recently suffered terrorist attacks.
"Sweden — they took in large numbers," Trump continued Saturday. "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."
Trump later tweeted that — as some had theorized — he was inspired by a Fox News segment on immigration and crime in Sweden, which aired on Friday but did not mention any specific atrocity that day.
The reaction
Shortly afterward Trump got a definitive response from Sweden — literally, as The Guardian points out, since one of Sweden's official Twitter accounts is controlled by a different Swede each week.
No. Nothing has happened here in Sweden. There has not ben any terrorist attacks here. At all. The main news right now is about Melfest. ->
— @sweden / Emma (@sweden) February 19, 2017
"No. Nothing has happened here in Sweden," tweeted Emma, the school librarian running the account this week.
Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound. https://t.co/XWgw8Fz7tj
— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) February 19, 2017
Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt's answer was a bit more blunt: "Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?"
Swedish fish incident.
Tragedy by the pound #swedenincident pic.twitter.com/Wku4Xa78Ic— 〰Robin〰 (@indifferentlmp) February 19, 2017
Horrifying video of the #SwedenIncident that fake news won't report. pic.twitter.com/LHwGRSgkd9
— Lon Diggs (@LonDiggs3) February 19, 2017
#swedenincident Iceland found responsible for swede massacre pic.twitter.com/rpySie7f3L
— OnceUponAnAngel (@StandardWing) February 19, 2017
Naturally, the rest of the Internet was quick to let loose its seemingly never-ending store of snark and mockery. By Sunday, #SwedenIncident was trending on Twitter, as many tweeters the world over helpfully suggested ideas to jog the Swedes' memories of just what exactly happened Friday night.
What the president says he was talking about
Some quickly began theorizing about what Trump may have been referring to.
The Guardian, for instance, suggested Trump may have confused Sweden with the Pakistani town of Sehwan, where just days ago a suicide bomber brutally killed dozens of worshippers at a Sufi shrine.
turns out "what happened last night in Sweden" actually just means "last night I was watching Tucker Carlson talk about Sweden" pic.twitter.com/6z5pfOJ7Yv
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) February 19, 2017
Others, like The New York Daily News, posit that Trump was referring to an interview with filmmaker Ami Horowitz that aired Friday night on Fox News.
Trump's tweet on Sunday — that he was referencing "a story that was broadcast on Fox News concerning immigrants and Sweden" — fits with this explanation.
Regardless of how it came about, the incident calls attention to a telling aspect of American political life, as Martin Gelin, U.S. correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, tells NPR: Sweden can be a kind of Rorschach test in American politics, which inspires different reactions depending on where one's beliefs fall on the political spectrum.
"The left really admires Sweden, and the far right views Sweden as a nightmare," Gelin says.
Recalling his own experiences while reporting in the U.S., Gelin notes that the different opinions he saw between progressives and conservatives were usually tied to the issues they're most concerned about.
"Conservatives, especially from the far right, know that Sweden has welcomed more refugees than almost any other country in Europe, especially in proportion to how small the country is. Many of them have heard erroneous or heavily exaggerated stories about increases in crime and arson and things like that.
"But on the left, you have the completely opposite view of Sweden as a progressive paradise, especially among Bernie Sanders supporters. I've heard a lot of people talking about Sweden as the country that they wanted to emulate."
As The New York Times reports, citing the Swedish Migration Agency, the country "processed 81,000 asylum seekers in 2014, 163,000 in 2015 and 29,000 last year, with another 25,000 to 45,000 expected this year."
The most recent terrorist attack in Sweden, according to The Associated Press, happened in 2010, when an Iraqi-born Swede carried out a suicide bombing, injuring two people and killing only himself.
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Permalink Reply by Westerly_2 on
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Yeah, I can't talk about the speech either. What, no tweets already?
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Permalink Reply by Carol T on
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I hope this is true, and that the GOP is in trouble, but I doubt it.
**** PRESIDENTIAL PLEDGE ****
Tell President Trump you support his administration!
Establishment Republicans have become one of the biggest threats to President Trump's agenda.
Meaning we not only have to deal with the continued onslaught from radical Democrats, members of our own party could betray us at any time.
That's why I'm asking you to join me with your pledge of support and show the Trump Administration that you have its back.I TRUST TRUMP! With your help, we can force them to stand down -- so I'm asking you to help me gather 50,000 "I TRUST TRUMP" petition signatures in the next 24 hours.
Tell President Trump you have his back.
OFFICIAL PETITION STATUS: ##PENDING##
I need to secure 50,000 more signatures in the next 24 hours – click below to add your name.
INSTA-SIGN >>Carol,
It appears our worst fears are coming true. Establishment Republicans are turning on President Trump.
The Associated Press reports: "Republicans have emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to Trump's young administration, imperiling his early efforts to pass his agenda and make good on some of his biggest campaign promises."
That's where you come in -- to counter the establishment's insurrection I'm asking you to sign your personalized "I TRUST TRUMP" petition a...
Once you've signed, will you also contribute $50, $25, or even $5 and help us pressure both sides of Congress to confirm Judge Gorsuch and advance the America First agenda?
Carol, the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, USA Today, and Washington Post have recognized our efforts to lead the charge for President Trump in Washington.
Great America PAC has aired more than 22,000 TV spots, sent more than 4 million pro-Trump mailers, and made more than 7 million phone calls supporting President Trump!
But right now, your petition signature and the signatures of hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans in support of the Trump administration is far more powerful than Washington's elite -- will you sign your personalized "I TRUST TRUMP" petition?
Carol, will you also make a special gift of $50, $25, or $5? Because it will be up to us to take on both radical Democrats and establishment Republicans in order to pass the America First agenda.
With your help we can convince these establishment Republicans to stand down, for the good of our country!
Sincerely,
Ed Rollins
National Co-Chair, Great America PAC
P.S. -- Carol, the LA Times, NY Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal know Great America PAC is doing the most to help President Trump advance the America First agenda in Washington. Please click here to sign your personalized "I TRUST TRUMP" petition right now! -
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Hmmm, very interesting. Could just be a plan to get people to send their dollars in. The establishment has been wary of him for awhile, but so far going along to get their stuff passed and signed. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
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From The New York Times
By David Leonhardt
Monday, March 20, 2017
All The President’s Lies
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
The ninth week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with the F.B.I. director calling him a liar.
The director, the very complicated James Comey, didn’t use the L-word in his congressional testimony Monday. Comey serves at the pleasure of the president, after all. But his meaning was clear as could be. Trump has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones, and Comey explained there is “no information that supports” the claim.
I’ve previously argued that not every untruth deserves to be branded with the L-word, because it implies intent and somebody can state an untruth without doing so knowingly. George W. Bush didn’t lie when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Obama didn’t lie when he said people who liked their current health insurance could keep it. They made careless statements that proved false (and they deserved much of the criticism they got).
But the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.
He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies.
Trump sets out to deceive people. As he has put it, “I play to people’s fantasies.”
Caveat emptor: When Donald Trump says something happened, it should not change anyone’s estimation of whether the event actually happened. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. His claim doesn’t change the odds.
Which brings us to Russia.
Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign was an attack on the United States. It’s the kind of national-security matter that a president and members of Congress swear to treat with utmost seriousness when they take the oath of office. Yet now it has become the subject of an escalating series of lies by the president and the people who work for him.
As Comey was acknowledging on Monday that the F.B.I. was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump was lying about it. From both his personal Twitter account and the White House account, he told untruths.
A few hours later, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, went before the cameras and lied about the closeness between Trump and various aides who have documented Russian ties. Do you remember Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, who ran the crucial delegate-counting operation? Spicer said Manafort had a “very limited role” in said campaign.
The big question now is not what Trump and the White House are saying about the Russia story. They will evidently say anything. The questions are what really happened and who can uncover the truth.
The House of Representatives, unfortunately, will not be doing so. I was most saddened during Comey’s testimony not by the White House’s response, which I’ve come to expect, but by the Republican House members questioning him. They are members of a branch of government that the Constitution holds as equal to the presidency, but they acted like Trump staff members, decrying leaks about Russia’s attack rather than the attack itself. The Watergate equivalent is claiming that Deep Throat was worse than Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon.
It fell to Adam Schiff, a Democratic representative from Southern California, to lay out the suspicious ties between Trump and Russia (while also hinting he couldn’t describe some classified details). Schiff did so in a calm, nine-minute monologue that’s worth watching. He walked through pro-Putin payments to Michael Flynn and through another Trump’s aide’s advance notice of John Podesta’s hacked email and through the mysterious struggle over the Republican Party platform on Ukraine.
“Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible,” Schiff said. “But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.”
Comey, as much as liberals may loathe him for his 2016 bungling, seems to be one of the few public officials with the ability and willingness to pursue the truth. I dearly hope that Republican members of the Senate are patriotic enough to do so as well.
Our president is a liar, and we need to find out how serious his latest lies are.
You can join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. I am also writing a daily email newsletter and invite you to subscribe.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).
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From The National Review:
Trump Learns the Hard Way That Policy Details Matter
by Jim Geraghty March 24, 2017 6:39 PMThe president would have had an easier time getting GOP congressmen to yes on the AHCA if he’d understood what was keeping them at no.
The good news is no one can say President Trump didn’t try to persuade House Republicans that they should pass the American Health Care Act. He invited lawmakers to the White House, dispatched his key aides to Capitol Hill, worked the phones, cajoled, charmed, arm-twisted, threatened . . .
He did everything short of actually attempting to understand why House Republicans didn’t want to vote for it.
President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan chose to cancel the vote on the AHCA late Friday afternoon. Earlier this week, the loudest argument from Trump was that if House Republicans didn’t pass the bill, it could cost the GOP their majority in 2018. This may or may not be true; it’s also possible that passing a disappointing replacement could cost the GOP their majority.
Either way, Trump went so far as to threaten primary challenges to those who didn’t sign on.
It’s not that the House Republicans who refused to vote for the bill didn’t fear such a threat, or that they were nonchalant about keeping their majority. They held out not because they lacked motivation to replace Obamacare.
No, in the end, they simply didn’t like what was in the bill and didn’t have faith that the Senate would improve it, or that it would get better in conference committee. At least for now, a significant number of House Republicans fear the consequences of passing an insufficient bill more than the consequences of failing to pass a bill.
Some Republicans felt that the American Health Care Act wouldn’t do enough to lower premiums, which many consumers find too high. The CBO score said that the bill would reduce the costs of insurance eventually . . . but increase them in the first three years. It’s fair to ask whether voters would feel warm to Republicans in fall of 2018 if a GOP replacement plan passed and they still found themselves paying too much for too little care. Some House Republicans want to repeal Obamacare’s requirement that insurance plans cover outpatient care, emergency-room visits, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental-health and addiction treatment, prescription drugs, rehabilitative services, lab services, preventive care, and pediatric services.
On the one hand, mandating so much coverage does add to the costs of insurers, raising premiums. On the other hand, consumers like being comprehensively covered.
Others contended that the replacement just worked too much like Obamacare to meet their standards. Mo Brooks of Alabama declared, “It doesn’t deliver on the promise I made to fully repeal Obamacare.”
Representative Rick Crawford of Arkansas tweeted that “the bill currently maintains [Obamacare’s] overall structure/approach, an approach that cements the federal government’s role in health insurance.”
Conservative health-policy wonks, meanwhile, had their own objections. Avik Roy pointed out that the AHCA “would lead to significant spikes in net insurance premiums for lower-income participants in the individual insurance market, with particular problems for those in their fifties and sixties.” These are thorny issues that involve trade-offs. You can try to to sweep away everything that’s bad about Obamacare, but there’s no way to do that without disrupting millions of voters’ lives. You can try to control costs, but that’s hard to do without limiting benefits. You can’t enact some of Republicans’ favorite proposals, such as tort reform and selling insurance across state lines, without either some support from Senate Democrats or the elimination of the filibuster.
As House Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows put it, almost no one in his caucus wanted to vote no. They wanted to get to yes but simply didn’t see enough good in the bill to make voting for it worthwhile. A strong leader can help sort out conflicting priorities, but there’s little sign that President Trump had any interest in that role.
Throughout the last days of arm-twisting, there were ominous reports that he was quite passionately attempting to persuade House Republicans to pass the bill, without really understanding what was in the legislation that made them so reluctant to vote for it. An unnamed House GOP aide told CNN that when it came to the details of the legislation, Trump “either doesn’t know, doesn’t care or both.”
In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Steel, a former GOP leadership aide, offered a bizarre portrait of a president who’s somehow simultaneously eager and clueless: Ryan has learned that his wonky style of communication is wasted on Trump given the president’s lack of interest in policy details, Steel said. But he has come to value Trump’s eagerness to exert pressure on wavering Republicans.
It appears President Trump cared a lot more about getting a win than about what, exactly, he would be winning. And that lack of focus on the details helped deny him the victory he wanted so badly.
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What Sean Spicer's Hitler gaffe reveals
Paul Waldman - The Week - Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
Sean Spicer is no historian, that's for sure.
And for a man whose job it is to talk in front of cameras, Spicer is spectacularly inarticulate, though it was almost hard not to feel sorry for him on Tuesday as he frantically scampered through a bunch of half-sentences and aborted ideas about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Adolf Hitler, chemical weapons and the Holocaust, in a desperate search for an exit out of the rhetorical chamber of horrors he had locked himself into.
But I'm not here to make fun of him (Okay, maybe just a little). I want to argue that there are reasons why Spicer found himself saying ludicrous things about World War II, having to do with the Trump administration's morally and logically bankrupt policy in Syria, and likely in the rest of the world.
When Spicer began sharing his thoughts on World War II, he was trying to explain why it was that President Trump decided to lob a few dozen missiles at a Syrian air base after Assad's government launched a chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, the first such attack since Trump took office. It required explanation, since Trump had spent years as a private citizen telling President Obama not to intervene militarily in Syria, even after a much worse chemical attack in 2013. And there's the matter of the half million or so civilians Assad has already killed with conventional weapons, which also did not lead Trump to consider military action.
So to justify Trump's decision, Spicer had little choice but to argue that what happened in Khan Sheikhoun was qualitatively worse than anything that had come before. That justification can be found in the taboo against the use of chemical weapons, one that is widely shared but almost never seriously interrogated. Without going into too much detail on the question, it's difficult to argue that having your family gassed to death would be worse than having them blown apart by a bomb.
But when Trump made his decision, it was then left to his aides and allies, none more than Spicer, to explain why it was that these particular victims of Assad's boundless brutality demanded American military action. If you have to argue that a chemical weapons attack on a single town is by far the worst thing that has happened in a bloody civil war that has lasted for six years, and you're desperately trying to make the case to skeptical reporters, you might find yourself reaching for something like, "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons."
The likely thought that was spinning around Sean Spicer's addled mind at that moment was probably that the Germans didn't use chemical weapons on the battlefield (to which one would have to reply, So what?). But facing a room full of dropped jaws and frantically tweeting fingers, Spicer tried to explain, and just made things worse:
The clear implication, at least in the moment, was that as bad as it may have been to kill millions in death camps (or "the Holocaust center"), dropping chemical weapons on a town is even worse. With time to reflect and choose his words more carefully, Spicer surely wouldn't say such a thing. And afterward he apologized, not only to the public but also in a phone call to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, apparently on the theory when you offend the Jews, making amends requires a personal apology to the richest Jew Donald Trump knows.
But right then it was what he found himself saying, because he was charged with arguing that the attack on Khan Sheikhoun was so horrific that it outweighed everything else that Assad has done. And his statement was peppered with other words and phrases meant to convey the unique horror of this event: that the victims were "innocent" (unlike other Syrian victims, not to mention those in the Holocaust?), and that Assad had killed "his own people" (as though German Jews were not German, not to mention the implication that it wouldn't have been as bad had it been someone else's people he was slaughtering).
Even in ordinary circumstances, Sean Spicer's job is exceedingly difficult, because he has to defend Donald Trump. This task requires him to do things like go before the cameras and insist that Trump's inauguration was the best attended in history, when both he and everyone listening to him knows he's lying. But it gets even harder when he has to defend incoherent policies like the one the administration is executing in Syria.
And it is incoherent, because it seems to be based mostly on Trump's whims, like his desire to seem tougher than Barack Obama. Which of course you can't say out loud, so you have to offer a humanitarian justification for what was ultimately a weak and ineffectual military strike, given the fact that the Syrian government not only resumed flights out of the airfield we bombed within a day or so, but even resumed bombing Khan Sheikhoun itself.
The administration's foreign policy doctrine used to be "America First," meaning we would do whatever was in our own narrow interests, with little or no regard to alliances or humanitarian concerns. Now its position seems to be that America will intervene militarily in a civil war if and only if somebody uses chemical weapons, because those weapons are more awful than any other kind of weapon, provided the president is sufficiently moved by photos of dead babies.
Would you want to go in front of reporters and try to defend that? If you had to, you might not be dumb enough to make Hitler comparisons. But you'd have a pretty hard time.
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Poor Spicey. I heard he's had the job, administration after administration, as the official Easter Bunny at the White House Easter egg roll. Now, there's a job he's qualified for. He fits the suit.
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