All right, fine. Let's talk about Sweden.
On Saturday during his campaign rally—because that is what Donald Trump thinks a president does, he holds campaign rallies—Trump spoke mournfully about the tragedy "last night in Sweden."
“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 here, as was immediately pointed out by, let's say, a goodly percentage of all the other adult and mostly-functional people on planet Earth, is that nothing happened "last night in Sweden." Swedish politicians and authorities were flummoxed; the Swedish government politely asked Trump to explain himself; Trump became, yet again, the worldwide target of social media mockery as wags challenged themselves to parsing out just what tragedy may have happened that had so traumatized der Pumpkinfuhrer while remaining invisible to the rest of us.
It got to the point where Trump himself had to clarify that he was talking about a Fox News segment about Swedish immigration that he had watched on the teevee.
What segment? Well, we don't know for certain—Donald does not necessarily get the same channels in his head that the rest of us have on our cable boxes—but he appears to have been referring to a standard, typical "alt-right" fearmongering piece by Fox News' newest insincere hack, Tucker Carlson. The premise was that the 200,000 refugees (Muslims! Eek!) granted asylum in the peaceful and idyllic Sweden have been turning the place into a crime-ridden hellhole, because that is just how (Muslim!) war refugees are. The premise: that there is an "absolute surge in both gun violence and rape" that the Swedish people themselves are not acknowledging because they're just too damn nice, and how nuts is that, and that there are now "no-go" zones of Muslimy Muslimness which are both "lovely" but which the Swedish police dare not enter, and so on and so forth.
For the record? The premise is bunk, and the “film” appears to be a propaganda effort rather than a journalistic one. Crime rates in Sweden have been decreasing; police officers interviewed for the “film” are angry that the filmmaker edited their quotes dishonestly.
You will recognize all of it as the precise talking points of the white nationalist movement, which for years has devoted themselves to the notion that Muslim war refugees and immigrants are tainting Europe with crimes, and rapes, and "no-go" zones, and cannot assimilate, and that each European nation to welcome them in is only sealing their doom. That's what Tucker Carlson presented to the nation, without evidence other than a "filmmaker" willing to say so; that is what Donald Trump then referred to as "last night in Sweden," because he is an ignorant boob who cannot differentiate between loudmouth opinion segments on pundit television shows and The Real Freaking World.
We should be grateful, no doubt, that he has not yet announced a task force to deal with the threat the Kool-Aid Man poses to our nation's border walls, or has not yet sent Seal Team 6 off to dispatch with the incorrigible waifs who have been stealing our Lucky Charms.
So this is our lives now. Fox News promotes the talking points of white nationalists and hardline xenophobes; the sitting president watches these segments on television and believes whatever they say; the sitting president announces these beliefs to the world, causing worldwide mockery and derision. Oh, and he uses those imaginary, invented scenarios to justify his own racist and xenophobic policies, because of course he does.
And it's only been a few weeks. They can't get him to turn off the television, or even change the damn channel. They can't get him to give up his spittle-flecked Twitter rants. Or stop holding rallies. Or to even work in the White House for more than five days at a stretch without fleeing back to his Florida private club and golf course. It's only been a few weeks, and here we (still) are.
It’s not just that the man is an authoritarian-minded racist who has surrounded himself with unqualified and incompetent yes-men. He’s also an absolute, stone-cold idiot.