We all knew, as Donald Trump was inaugurated, there would be lies. He had spent months on the campaign trail spewing stories of pure fabrication with many hoping that his behaviour would subdue after the election win.
Four weeks in and unfortunately nothing has changed. We have been told by Trump himself and his advisors about several terror events that did not even take place. At a campaign style rally in Florida The Donald spoke about the terror attacks in Brussels and France before exclaiming his surprise of what is happening in Sweden.
Journalists were in a frenzy trying to find out just what was going on in the Scandinavian country. Was there another European terror attack we were waiting to receive a notification for? No.
It turns out that Trump was, once again, scaremongering. In complete fairness he did not say there was an attack in Sweden. He did however talk about it in the same breath as other attacks alluding to the fact their had been one.
“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.” Following this quote he spoke of the Brussels attack as well as the two attacks in Paris .
He was talking about European attacks as a way to justify his Muslim ban. His fans, unsurprisingly, now believe there was a terror attack in Sweden the night before. POTUS later tweeted that he had in fact got the story from a documentary he had watched on Fox News, known to be a completely unreliable ‘news’ channel.
Counsellor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, also made up an attack. The Bowling Green Massacre was coined three times by the advisor in interviews to justify the Muslim ban.
Conway was later called out on the fictitious claim and said that she “misspoke”. Stating that she meant the arrest of two Iraqi refugees in 2011 that were sending material support to al-Qaeda.
Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary, also lied about a fictitious terror attack at the end of January. He spoke of an attack in Atlanta in two different interviews before sending an email to ABC saying that he obviously meant the Florida nightclub shooting. That attack was carried out by Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen born in New York.
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) 19 February 2017
There will always be mistakes and slips of the tongue when so many interviews are given but in these cases they were mentioned more than once.
Is the government purposefully making up attacks to justify executive orders and to create fear among the populous?
The fears created by the attacks on 9/11 garnered huge support for Bush and the Iraq war. It also swelled a submissiveness from the public. This fear allows governments to get away with the grey legislation that crosses basic human rights boundaries.
Current PM Theresa May used the fear of another 7/7 to pass through her Snoopers Charter legislation. This allowed the monitoring of incoming/outgoing activity on phones and computers.
I believe Trump is using the same fear tactics used by Bush and May. This would create a United States that does not question his decisions regardless of how detrimental they are to the people.
I hope that the President of the United States/leader of the free world, counsellor to the President and White House Press Secretary are so incompetent that these claims are genuine mistakes.
However if this is wrong and they intentionally made up the attacks in order to strike fear into the public, then a quote from TV show The Newsroom will round this off nicely.
“I think people who wilfully, purposefully, and gleefully lie to the American people in order to damage someone’s reputation should, like a registered sex offender, be required by law to come with that warning label for the rest of their lives.”
Daily Politikos 