A Swedish journalist has compared supporters of U.S. President Donald J. Trump to members of the Islamic State terror group after an incident involving the campaign bus of Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Jonna Sima, who writes for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, commented on an incident that took place in Texas over the weekend that involved several vehicles belonging to Trump supporters surrounding the campaign bus of former Vice-President Joe Biden.
“Images that evoke thoughts of the [Islamic State] caliphate… and is cheered at by the anti-democratic president,” Sima wrote on social media platform Twitter and linked to an Aftonbladet article regarding the incident.
The comment was criticised by many on the social media platform with the tweet seeing over 400 replies, compared to fewer than 200 likes and under a hundred retweets.
After being criticised by one user, Sima doubled down saying the Trump supporters, “behave in an anti-democratic way reminiscent of [Islamic State].”
The incident Sima referred to took place in Texas and video of it was shared by President Trump on Twitter with the caption, “I LOVE TEXAS!”
Neither Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, nor his running mate Kamala Harris were on the bus at the time of the incident but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have launched an investigation into the incident.
Following the FBI announcement, President Trump commented, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!”
The comments from Sima come just weeks after Eva Hamilton, the former CEO of Sweden’s public television broadcaster SVT, claimed that no one in Sweden likes President Trump.
“In Sweden, there is a kind of consensus that Trump is dangerous and an idiot… No one likes Trump in Sweden,” she said.
Mainstream media in other European countries have expressed similar hostility of the U.S. leade rover the last few years.
In 2017, Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of the left-leaning newspaper Die Zeit, went even further on a television programme saying only “murder in the White House” could stop the “Trump catastrophe.”