By KATHRYN WILSON
STAFF WRITER

Mere weeks after Kellyane Conway, Counselor to the President for Donald Trump, came under fire for her invention of the “Bowling Green Massacre,” President Trump himself is facing scrutiny for his allusion to nonexistent terrorist attacks in Sweden over the weekend.

The controversy arose when, during a speech at his rally in Melbourne, FL on Saturday, February 18, President Trump addressed the issue of national security. After emphasizing the need to keep our country safe, primarily from outside interlopers or refugees, President Trump stated: “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?”

The problem? There was nothing occurring in Sweden on the previous night, nor were there any refugee-related crises that unfolded in either the years preceding or the days following. According to The Associated Press, the only newsworthy happenings reported in the Aftonbladet, a widely circulated Swedish tabloid, on the night in question were: “a man being treated for a burn injury, an avalanche warning, and police chasing a drunken driver.”

People were quick to point out the president’s faux pas. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, tweeted: “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound” mere hours after President Trump’s comments reached worldwide news outlets.
Various individuals also took to Twitter to poke fun at President Trump’s statements, utilizing the hashtag #lastnightinSweden to mention minor events that had actually occurred in the nation of Sweden on February 17.

Although no one seemed quite sure as to what President Trump was referencing in his speech, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as well as President Trump, offered their own explanations on Sunday, February 19. Specifically, they said that President Trump was referring to a story run by Fox News on the perils of immigration in Sweden rather than to a terrorist attack that had occurred the evening before.

While this explanation satiated some, others found further fault with the Fox News story to which President Trump was referring, as it portrayed Sweden as being a recent hub of terrorist activity. In actuality, there hasn’t been a terrorist attack in Sweden since December of 2010, which was prior to the mass influx of refugees into Swedish borders.

Thelmo President R. Christopher DiMezzo ’18 expressed concern about President Trump’s statements, saying “It is disheartening that the president of our nation continues to rely on inaccurate information from Fox News despite his access to countless sources of reliable intelligence on issues worldwide.”

President Trump’s alleged invention of terrorist attacks in Sweden is further complicated by the fact that there was an actual attack by ISIS in Pakistan recently, which Trump ignored entirely in his speech.

In referring to Trump’s aforementioned disregard of the attack in Pakistan, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, wrote that “Instead of making up something in Sweden, Trump could have invoked an actual deadly ISIS attack in Pakistan. But only Muslims died in that.”