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After bewildering residents and officials of Sweden by suggesting Saturday that a terror-related incident had occurred over the weekend in the small Nordic nation, President Donald Trump attributed his comment to a Fox News interview with a conservative filmmaker.

"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," Trump told the crowd at his campaign-like rally in Florida on Saturday, critiquing Europe's refugee policies and complaining that his travel ban had suffered setbacks in court. "Sweden, who would believe this?"

It was unclear following the rally what could have occurred in Sweden to draw the president's attention, and the Swedish Embassy asked for clarity.

Trump took to his Twitter account Sunday evening to explain that he was referring to a Tucker Carlson segment that appeared on Fox News Friday. In the segment, Carlson interviewed right-wing filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who had recently made a documentary about Sweden's refugee policy. The segment did not contain breaking news.

A spokesperson for the Swedish Embassy said they didn't know if Trump's tweet served as the government's official response to their request for an explanation.

"We have asked State Department if President Trumps' tweet is their official answer to our question earlier today. We are still awaiting an answer on that," the spokesperson said.

A White House spokesperson had attempted to explain what Trump had been referring to prior to Trump's tweet.

"He was talking about rising crime and recent incidents in general not referring to a specific incident," White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.

But the country had spent the day baffled, because the president had said "last night" and nothing appeared to have happened.

"Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound," Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, wrote on Twitter while he attended the Munich Security Conference on Sunday.

Sweden's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Catarina Axelsson, told the Associated Press that the Swedish government did not know of any "terror-linked major incidents." Additionally, the Associated Press reported, Sweden's Security Police had not seen any threats or responded to any attacks.

Sweden's U.S. embassy also appeared to take a jab at the president on Twitter Sunday evening, retweeting Trump's earlier justification and saying: "We look forward to informing the US administration about Swedish immigration and integration policies."

Trump's remarks were not the first time that somebody in his administration has referred to nonexistent terror attacks as they defended his executive order restricting travel for people from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway invoked a "Bowling Green massacre," which never occurred. Conway has since said she made a mistake. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer cited a nonexistent terror attack in Atlanta, then later claimed he meant the shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida a city more than 400 miles south of Atlanta.

No terrorist attack in the U.S. has actually occurred at the hands of individuals from any of the seven countries whose people Trump's first executive order barred.

Sweden, meanwhile, has not experienced a terrorist act committed by a refugee or person of the Muslim faith since December 2010, when an Iraqi-Swedish national detonated a suicide bomb.

According to the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security's Crime and Safety Report on Sweden, released last May, overall crime rose 4 percent in 2015. The increase was attributed to the rise in computer fraud. A section of the report is dedicated to terrorism threats, and provides the nation a "Terrorism Rating" of "Medium."

In 2015, the country received between 160,000-190,000 asylum seekers, which is the most per capita in the European Union.

Stockholm: View of Gamla Stan, Munkebroleden and Tyska Kyrkan ullstein bild / ullstein bild via Getty Images

On Sunday, in response to Trump, a

The tabloid also noted another incident: A photo of a moose bull attempting to get frisky with a wooden moose lawn ornament had gone viral.

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Donald Trump Explains Sweden Terror Comment That Baffled a Nation - NBCNews.com

Anti-Trump protestors are taking advantage of the federal holiday that celebrates Presidents to oppose the one that is currently in office. USA TODAY NETWORK

People attend a rally and a mock funeral for the presidency Saturday in New York.(Photo: Spencer Platt)

Anti-Trump activists have seized on Mondays federal holiday to organize Not My Presidents Day rallies in cities around the country.

Protest leaders say they expect thousands to take to the streets in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and as many as two dozen other communities in the latest round of demonstrations to oppose the policies of President Donald Trump.

Some 13,000 Facebook users, for instance, say they plan to join a noonprotest Monday near Manhattans Central Park.

While we acknowledge that Donald Trump holds the current title, the policies hes trying to put in place are not the beliefs shared by the majority of the people, said Nova Calise, a television production manager and one of the organizers of New York event.

We do not accept Donald Trump as our president because he does not represent us, she said, citing his policies on abortion and immigration as top concerns. Organizers say speakers will include Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Sonia Ossorio, who runs the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Calise said activists around the country were inspired by plans for a Presidents Day protest in Los Angeles and have collaborated via Facebook for about three weeks. No one expected this to get so large, she said. Thats the power of social media.

Other protests include:

In Los Angeles, activists plan a 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. protest outside City Hall.

In Atlanta, organizers plan what they call an ImPEACH Now march.

In Chicago, 3,700 people have indicated on Facebook that they will join Mondays noon rally across the Chicago River from the Trump Tower and another 16,000 say they are interested in the event.

One of the Chicago organizers, business professor Laura Hartman, said the event has an overarching theme of unity. Hartman said Trumps early moves from attacking journalists to imposing limits on immigration could splinter the public.

We dont want to pick an issue, said Hartman, who also attended the massive Womens March in Washington last month. By embracing a broad umbrella, we can show this administration that the numbers against it are broad."

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Protesters staged othermarches and rallies in the run-up to Presidents Day. In New York, for instance, activists gathered downtown Saturday at Washington Square Park to hold a mock funeral for the presidency. New York Police Department officials Sunday declined to provide a crowd estimate, citing department policy.

On Saturday, Trump staged his own rally for supporters in Florida,drawing roughly 9,000 people to an aircraft hangar in Melbourne.

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Thousands expected at 'Not My Presidents Day' rallies Monday - USA TODAY

It didn't matter. He won.

I learned: Politics is not mostly about logic or reality, but appearance and desire -- telling an emotionally appealing story, offering hope and making promises, even if you can't keep them.

Since the election, pundits have pondered why Donald Trump won, Hillary Clinton lost, and where the Trump presidency is headed. They have traced his win to Russian hacking, the Electoral College system, the media, James Comey, Bernie Sanders, and Clinton taking Midwestern blue collar voters for granted -- all of which clearly played roles. And they have repeatedly tried to understand and assess what Trump may now do.

Yet several additional critical issues have been ignored and deserve attention -- concerning the psychology of blame.

In a complex world, we look for causes and effects, and whom to blame. Most voters want simple answers. But the world is messy, defying easy solutions. Nonetheless, countless social media sites and messages seem to give answers, telling viewers who is at fault -- shaping attitudes and votes.

But while recent exposs have examined the mechanics of how particular fake news stories have gone viral, it is crucial to understand, too, why such stories prove so appealing -- how they assign blame.

The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman found that when confronting too much complex numerical information, people use mental shortcuts to process it -- so-called "fast" rather than "slow" thinking. Yet people also rely on "fast thinking" to process not only numbers, as he describes, but social and political problems and information as well.

We draw on prior beliefs, biases, and scripts -- familiar stories. These shortcuts generally involve narratives of blame -- helping us decide who or what caused the problem, and thus how we should solve it. People seek to fault others for problems because to hold ourselves accountable is too painful.

Blame serves several functions, assigning both physical cause and moral responsibility. It also involves complex cognitive, as well as social and emotional processing. Most complicated human events -- whether wars, recessions, diseases or elections -- result from multiple contributing factors. But we can't focus on all of them. Rather, we generally target our anger and frustration on only one.

I first became aware of the complex psychology of blame several years ago, when conducting research on women who had breast cancer and breast cancer mutations. "I always knew I shouldn't have stayed in that awful relationship all those years," the first woman I interviewed told me.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Because that's why I have breast cancer."

"But you have the mutation," I said, cautiously.

"Yes, but what triggered it was the stress of that bad relationship -- that's when I got diagnosed." Repeatedly, women I surveyed blamed their disease on the stresses of bad bosses or companies' pollution, rather than the mutation, itself. Doctors emphasize genes, but these women didn't.

These patients weren't necessarily wrong. After all, only 50% percent of women who have the gene associated with breast cancer end up getting the disease. Other factors -- environmental or psychological -- can affect whether one develops the disease.

But, emotionally, these women all focused on these other factors, constructing narratives that made sense for them -- assigning blame subjectively, not based on science or all the facts.

These patients' stories may seem far afield from our new political realities, but offer key insights. Trump built a simple narrative that, for many voters, made sense of current national problems. He successfully faulted Clinton for all of our nation's difficulties, arguing that she had had 30 years to fix them, and had failed. She was the villain ("lock her up"). Blue collar workers were "victims" of an unfair system. He, uniquely, was the hero who would "make America great" again.

She consistently let him portray himself as "The Outsider" and paint her as representing all insiders -- Democrats and Republicans alike. She never contested these arguments. Presumably, she feared offending Republicans, whose support she sought.

Conventional political wisdom might say, "Don't waste time refuting your opponent -- let the press do it." But we no longer live in conventional political times; the press failed to do it sufficiently. She could instead have said, "Bipartisan politics is complicated. Many of us have tried to compromise. But not all elected officials have done so. In fact, Trump's party got us into the Iraq War, and helped create The Great Recession."

To assign, limit or escape blame, individuals employ various rhetorical strategies -- denying that certain events ever happened ("I didn't say that"), or giving justifications or excuses. But, to blame others and deny responsibility generally entails stretching the truth and minimizing accountability.

In the world of information overload, short attention spans, tweets and unvetted online "news," countless people lose track and become uncertain. The realities are far more complicated, but overly simplistic narratives stick -- partly because they mobilize rage.

Occasionally, we reevaluate and change our understanding -- when confronted by facts from trusted sources or when another storyline, based on this new information, feels more compelling, especially if the new explanation gives a sense of control.

Still, altering such perspectives can be hard. Some of the women with breast cancer whom I interviewed shifted their views of their disease, though doing so was not always easy. "I'm such a big environmentalist," one woman told me, "that it's hard for me to believe that genes also played a role in my cancer." She wrestled with the ambiguity of multiple factors contributing to her disease. Gradually, she came to appreciate this more nuanced reality, though it was less emotionally satisfying.

Yet social science can help us determine how to successfully develop and disseminate accurate messages -- both the form and content -- articulating and galvanizing anger against the status quo. Historically, certain messages have conveyed liberty and justice instead of hate -- as in the Arab Spring.

Importantly, we need to pay more attention to how the psychology of blame operates -- how humans inherently seek to assign fault, how that quest can be misused by Trump or other politicians, and how much is at stake -- the pursuit of truth that is crucial for our democracy.

Otherwise, we will all be waiting for soda to flow from the water fountains.

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Donald Trump and the psychology of blame - CNN

A Friend and Former Business Partner Speaks Out Against Donald Trump Wall Street Journal (subscription) MEXICO CITYA billionaire real-estate developer is breaking with Donald Trump over the president's immigration policies and stance toward Mexico, the latest high-profile businessman to publicly criticize the administration. Jorge Prez, a longtime ... and more »

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A Friend and Former Business Partner Speaks Out Against Donald Trump - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Sunday criticized the media, saying members of the press will fail to destroy President Trump.

"The media did not make Donald TrumpDonald TrumpChelsea Clinton attends Muslim solidarity rally in NYC Pentagon chief: 'I dont have any issues with the press' Kasich: The media is 'an important part of democracy' MOREand they can't destroy him," Limbaugh said on "Fox News Sunday."

He pointed to media organizations including ABC, CBC, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today.

"They have a formula, they have a blueprint for destroying Republican political officials they don't like," Limbaugh said.

Trump often blasts the media, referring to "fake news." In a recent tweet, Trump called the "FAKE NEWS media" the "enemy of the American people."

When asked Sunday about the tweet, Limbaugh said he thinks that "there's something to it."

"Trump won the election, on substance. Trump did more interviews. He explained his agenda more than any political presidential candidate ever has in my memory. And he has tried to stick to it," he said.

"Trump has a connection with his voters that most politicians don't have...and that connection that he has is not anything that anybody else can break. Only he can break it."

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Limbaugh: 'The media did not make Donald Trump and they can't destroy him' - The Hill