\u201cLook at what’s happening last night in Sweden,\u201d Donald Trump proclaimed before an adoring rally this week. Trouble was that nothing much happened in Sweden the night before, certainly not the terrorist incident the President seemed to be hinting at. The responses were dismissive. Twitter was filled with suggestions about disasters involving Ikea\u2019s self-assembly furniture. The former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt asked of Mr Trump: \u201cwhat has be been smoking?\u201d<\/p>\n
It turned out that Mr Trump had been watching the right-wing channel Fox News a few days earlier and seen an interview with an anti-immigration campaigner who claimed that refugees were causing a crime-wave in Sweden but that it was being covered up by Swedish police. There was zero evidence for this. But it fitted with Mr Trumps narrative of \u201cthe very, very dishonest press [that] doesn\u2019t even want to report\u201d on terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n
This is but one example of the dangerous blurring of fact and fiction characteristic of the new US President who has told demonstrable whoppers on everything from the size of the crowds at his inauguration to the current US murder rate which he says \u201c<\/strong>is the highest it’s been in 47 years\u201d when FBI statistics show it is almost at its lowest point. There are so many Trump untruths that one White House correspondent is keeping a running list. There were 80 after just 4 weeks in office, but that was before the Swedish fantasy. He has even claimed the sun was shining at a time when it was raining.<\/p>\n Some of this is merely silly, a reflection of Mr Trump\u2019s thin-skinned vanity which is unable to brook contradiction. Often leaves his listeners dumbfounded by the ridiculousness of his brazen lies. But there is a shameless quality to them which is unnerving. When one reporter pointed out the factual inaccuracy of one claim the President replied: \u201cWell, I don’t know. I was given that information\u2026 I\u2019ve seen that information around.\u201d<\/p>\n It was with a similar shifty side-step that Donald Trump first catapulted himself into politics repeating the claims of far-right conspiracy theorists that Barack Obama was ineligible to be US president because was not born in America. Confronted with evidence to the contrary Mr Trump persisted, just adding the preamble: \u201cA lot of people say that\u2026\u201d Belief replaces fact. His press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that when he said of his boss: \u201che believes what he believes.\u201d This is the politics of panto in which \u201cOh no it\u2019s isn\u2019t\u201d is deemed a sufficient refutation.<\/p>\n Yet this is serious. The Trump lies are not random. They have a pattern. His fabrications fit his various narratives: he is right and the press are wrong; facts are fake news whereas his assertions are unquestionable; America is rotten, because of blacks, Mexicans, immigrants and liberals and the press is lying to cover it up. To justify his self-image as the national saviour Donald Trump needs to depict a country which is in need of saving. His lies are attempts to shape a new reality. The new US president is not stupid. He is sinister.<\/p>\n \u00a0from The Church Times \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cLook at what’s happening last night in Sweden,\u201d Donald Trump proclaimed before an adoring rally this week. Trouble was that nothing much happened in Sweden the night before, certainly not the terrorist incident the President seemed to be hinting at. The responses were dismissive. Twitter was filled with suggestions about disasters involving Ikea\u2019s self-assembly furniture. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,551,725],"tags":[729],"class_list":["post-8473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-media-society","category-trumps-america","tag-lies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8474,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8473\/revisions\/8474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em><\/p>\n