Look What Happened Last Night in Sweden!

Trump rally in Melbourne Florida

Well yesterday our President flew to Florida for the weekend.  After all, why stay at Camp David when you can hunker down at Mar-a-Lago with your own butler and cronies.

As an aside, the government has already spent more on protecting this President than it spent in an entire year protecting the Obamas.  Trump seems to have little use for the government’s Presidential facilities.  Melania stays in New York at the T,T and they both fly to Florida each weekend; Mar-a-Lago is a “club” and there are members wandering about the restaurant and golf course.

Oh well.  Back to this post.

So the President flies to Melbourne, Florida yesterday (which is close to Orlando) on the way to Mar-a-Lago for a planned “rally” of his adoring followers in an airport hangar.

I thought the election was over and we were done with campaigning.  Apparently not.  The President had a bad week what with his National Security Advisor having to resign for talking to the Russians about sanctions before inauguration day (and then lying about it to the Vice President)  on top of having his next two candidates for the job publicly reject working for him.  Tsk tsk.

So Donald needed some love which he found in the contemporary version of the beer hall where he went on a rant about protecting the nation from those immigrant terrorists.  Cheers!  Donald felt the love.  Just in time for the weekend.

“You look at what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “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?”

Yes Mr. President.  Tell us.  What happened last night in Sweden?

Nothing particularly nefarious happened in Sweden on Friday — or Saturday, for that matter — even the Swedes were left baffled not to mention anyone in America with half a brain.

“Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister, wrote on Twitter.

“But the context of his remarks — he mentioned Sweden right after he chastised Germany, which also took in large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war and deprivation — clearly suggested that he thought something awful had happened.

“Sweden,” he said. “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. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe.”

Contrary to Mr. Trump’s allegations, nearly all of the men involved in terrorist assaults in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, in Brussels on March 22 last year, and in Nice, France, on July 14, were citizens of France or Belgium.”

Twitter users were quick to ridicule Mr. Trump’s remark, with joking references to the Swedish Chef, the “Muppets” character; Swedish meatballs; and Ikea, the furniture giant.   In an essay in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the journalist Martin Gelin speculated that “Trump might have gotten his news from the countless right-wing media in the United States that have long been reporting that Sweden is heading for total collapse.”

So the Donald ranted about terrorists and basked in the adulation of the mob though anyone in the crowd had a greater chance of being struck by a meteor than being killed by a terrorist; indeed had a greater chance of dying on the drive home.

So why does the President rant on (besides his need for the love)?

He rants on because fascism will come to America with the next attack.  Remember the bone chilling tweet of February 5th: : “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

“What’s taking shape here is a situation in which just one terrorist attack abroad or at home will enable Trump to point the finger of responsibility at the judiciary: “If only they’d listened to me,” he might declare, “then we’d be safe. Because our country is under attack. They want to kill us and chop off our heads! We need to shut down these bad, bad judges and their horrible courts before a mushroom cloud rises over New York City” wrote Phil Torres in Salon.

“What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?”  Perhaps it’s worth mentioning here that zero — that’s zero — Syrian refugees allowed into the U.S. through our refugee program  have been involved in a fatal terrorist attack. Virtually all of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. have involved American citizens, not refugees or immigrants.

No matter.

A significant portion of the conservative right will eagerly believe Trump, because another of Trump’s alarming tactics has been to delegitimize the press, which he now routinely calls “the opposition party.” Last week he tweeted that the press was “the enemy of the American people.”  Using Twitter to gain direct access to his followers, Trump will try to mobilize a small army of angry, ignorant xenophobes to see the independent judiciary as an enemy against America — essentially, as traitorous elites who don’t have national security in their best interest. Consequently, this group of followers will welcome an erosion of the court’s power — again, in the name of domestic protection against “the Muslims.”

And it’s just a matter of time.  And when the time comes it will be our turn to defend our institutions from authoritarians who would sweep them away in the name of “security.”

There is no shortage in this country of those who would willingly man the watchtowers and staff the camps.  Just look at the “beer hall.”  They are just waiting for the Reichstag fire.

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