Donald Trump wants you to believe that when he was making himself a laughingstock by lying about a massacre in Sweden that never happened he was making criticism of Sweden’s immigration policies. Of course, what he was actually doing was, like Kellyanne Conway, trying to sow fear of immigrants by inventing massacres committed by those immigrants.
In a tweet send out last night, Trump blamed Fox News for his lie:
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
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Of course, his lie was a nonexistent massacre, not a “statement…concerning immigrants,” which makes his statement seem very harmless when it was anything but.
Yet far from walking back his lie, he upped the ante this morning by tweeting this:
Give the public a break – The FAKE NEWS media is trying to say that large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully. NOT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2017
Trump was not talking about immigration in Sweden not working. He was inventing a lie about immigrants murdering Swedes. It was not an innocent observation as he would have you believe now, but an attempt to sow fear of immigrants to justify his Muslim ban.
The public could indeed use a break, but not from the media reporting Donald Trump’s lies, but rather from those lies. It’s not “fake news media” (in caps or otherwise) that’s the problem but the fake Trump administration.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.