Trump Invents a Terrorist Attack in Sweden

The Claim

At a campaign-style rally in Melbourne, Florida, on February 18, 2017, Trump rattled off a list of European countries supposedly suffering from terrorism in order to justify his travel ban targeting Muslim-majority nations. Then he ad-libbed a doozy: “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 problem was obvious to anyone who had not spent the previous evening mainlining Fox News: nothing had happened last night in Sweden. There was no attack. No incident. No crisis. The president of the United States had stood before thousands of supporters and invented a terrorist attack in a peaceful Scandinavian democracy to justify a discriminatory executive order.

Sweden Responds

Swedish officials reacted with a mixture of bewilderment and alarm. The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed it was unaware of any “terror-linked major incidents.” The Swedish Embassy in Washington formally contacted the U.S. State Department to request an explanation of the president’s remarks. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt captured the mood of an entire nation on Twitter: “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.”

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told reporters he was “surprised by the comments made about Sweden” and pointedly noted that leaders should “take responsibility for using facts correctly and verifying any information that we spread” — a standard Trump has never met.

The Fox News Defense

Faced with a country demanding to know what imaginary attack he was talking about, Trump took to Twitter the next day and explained that his remarks referred to “a story that was broadcast on Fox News concerning immigrants and Sweden.” The segment in question was a Tucker Carlson interview with right-wing filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who had made a documentary alleging that Sweden’s refugee policies led to increased crime. Even this defense crumbled: the Swedish police officers who appeared in the Horowitz documentary later said their quotes had been heavily edited and taken out of context to distort the reality of the situation.

So to recap: the president cited a Fox News segment based on a dishonest documentary featuring manipulated quotes to fabricate a nonexistent terrorist attack in a foreign country, all to scare Americans into supporting a ban on Muslim immigration. PolitiFact rated the claim False.

Part of the Pattern

The Sweden incident was not an isolated gaffe. It was a textbook example of the misinformation pipeline that defined Trump’s presidency: Fox News broadcasts inflammatory, misleading content; Trump absorbs it uncritically; Trump repeats it to millions of supporters as fact; the lie takes on a life of its own. This was the same president who had, just weeks earlier, sent his press secretary out to lie about inauguration crowd sizes and whose counselor had coined the term “alternative facts.”

What made the Sweden fabrication especially dangerous was that it involved invented violence attributed to immigrants and refugees — a tactic with a long and ugly history. When a president manufactures terrorist attacks to justify discrimination, he is not simply getting his facts wrong. He is deliberately constructing a false reality in which vulnerable people are cast as threats, giving permission for fear and hostility toward them. The laughter from Sweden was well-earned, but the underlying impulse was anything but funny.