Barcelona vehicle attack on Ramblas

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I'm so tired of this world and all the ways things are.

Trump's probably happy attention is off of him.

Isn't there some way for the media to involve him in it?

I'm so tired of this world and all the ways things are.

All kidding aside, I expect Trump to use this incident to justify Anti-Muslim travel and immigration bans, thereby trying to give his Alt Right supporters ammo for their nativist stance.

There you go. I wasn't kidding. I expect Trump will become connected with this somehow in a negative way. Not as in poor Trump is going to get picked on, but that just it seems inevitable.

All kidding aside, I expect Trump to use this incident to justify Anti-Muslim travel and immigration bans, thereby trying to give his Alt Right supporters ammo for their nativist stance.

In a tweet seemingly responding to the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, President Donald Trump referenced a factually inaccurate anecdote about combatting Muslim enemies that he often repeated on the campaign trail.

Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught," wrote Trump, less than four hours after the attack. "There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!"

The president's post was apparently in reference to a legend about World War I-era Army Gen. John J. Pershing that he first told publicly during a campaign rally in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 2016. According to Trump, Pershing dipped the bullets used to execute Muslim terrorists in pig blood. The Quran prohibits the consumption of pork, which is considered to be "impure."

"They had a terrorism problem and there's a whole thing with swine and pigs and you know the story they don't like them ... and Gen. Pershing was a rough guy and he sits on his horse and he's very astute, like a ramrod. ... And he caught 50 terrorists that did tremendous damage and killed many people ... and he dipped 50 bullets in pig's blood," Trump explained.

"And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people," he continued. "And the 50th person he said, 'You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.' And for 25 years there wasn't a problem, OK? Twenty-five years there wasn't a problem!"

At the time the story was told, Politifact, an organization that fact-checks the claims of politicians, evaluated Trump's tale and concluded it to be "ridiculous." Politifact cited eight historians who not only noted that the evidence for the blood-dipped bullet aspect of the story "is thin," but also that violence and unrest continued in the referenced region in the Philippines for years during and after U.S. involvement.

Snopes writes of a 1927 Chicago Daily Tribune story noting Pershing "sprinkled some prisoners with pig's blood," which was ultimately "more powerful than bullets" as a warning before releasing the prisoners, as well of a separate account that "attributed the deed to someone other than Pershing."