STOCKHOLM – Rinkeby, where Iraqi immigrant Hussein Jawadi owns a small grocery story in a suburb of this Scandinavian capital, is not what might be called traditional "storybook" Sweden: white, Christian, rural. No one has blonde hair and blue eyes. Or drives a Volvo. Or listens to the pop group ABBA and other common stereotypes.

If Sweden is a nation of pristine, forested archipelagoes and chic design, where an efficient welfare state ensures a high standard of living – and where the Viking heritage of its tall, reserved citizens remains endlessly apparent – then Rinkeby is its near-opposite: urban, crammed with grubby apartment blocks, never far from unrest, the faces on the streets overwhelmingly of African descent, usually Somalia.

"There’s problems here," said Jawadi. "Drugs and weapons. But from what I have seen on the news and in movies, not more than New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore."

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump called Baltimore "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess." He appears to have a thing about low-income enclaves in Europe like Rinkeby, if his statements and tweets are to be believed. He has spoken of a "sea of blood" in London and "petrified" police in "no-go" areas of Paris.

But the president keeps coming back – refraining, rhetorically – to Sweden.

In his 1987 book, "The Art of the Deal," Trump reaffirmed a false myth about his family's origins, writing that his father's father came to the U.S. "from Sweden as a child" when he actually came from Germany. He never fully explained the falsehood.

"Sweden," Trump said during a campaign-style rally in Florida in 2017. "They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible." He was referring to the nation's refugee policy. In the same speech, he referenced a nonexistent terror attack in the nation to bolster his calls for tighter immigration policies.

Last month, Sweden's 10 million inhabitants were reminded about the outsize role their country plays in Trump's thinking when he offered to come to the aid of A$AP Rocky, an American rapper who was charged with assault for getting into a fight with a 19-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan on a street in Stockholm. The incident occurred a few days ahead of A$AP Rocky’s scheduled performance at a music festival. Prosecutors allege the musician attacked Mustafa Jafari with a glass bottle.

A$AP Rocky, born Rakim Mayers, denies the charge. After his trial in Stockholm – he faced a maximum sentence of two years in prison – a judge on Wednesday found the American rapper guilty of assault and ordered him to pay a fine to the victim. Ahead of the verdict, A$AP Rocky was not ordered to remain in custody or surrender his passport, meaning he was allowed to leave Sweden in early August with two other co-defendants.

"A$AP Rocky released from prison and on his way home to the United States from Sweden. It was a Rocky Week, get home ASAP A$AP!," Trump tweeted at the time.

On Wednesday, the musician was given a suspended sentence.

Trump has reacted atypically to the case.

Even though Sweden, in common with many European countries, doesn’t have a bail system – something Dennis Martinsson, a legal expert at Stockholm University said ensures the wealthy can't "buy their temporary freedom" – Trump had offered to cover A$AP Rocky’s bail. And in a move that political scientists say there are few historical precedents for in respect of purely criminal cases, Trump publicly asked Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven to intervene on the international rap star's behalf, saying in a tweet that Sweden "let our African American community down" by not freeing him.

Löfven refused, pointing out that the government can’t meddle in legal proceedings.

"There certainly are countries around the world where the judiciary is little more than an instrument of the arbitrary powers of the ruling strongman, and where the political leadership can send people in and out of prison at their discretion. Sweden is most certainly not one of those countries," Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden, wrote in an opinion piece about Trump’s offer in The Washington Post last week.

"I’ve been having trouble coming up with examples of such blatant judicial interference from a world leader," said Merrick Tabor, an American-born professor of international relations at Stockholm University. Tabor noted that last year Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu claimed Trump was working on extraditing exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, a longtime target of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Gulen lives in Pennsylvania and Turkey considers him to be the orchestrator of a failed 2016 coup. However, Çavuşoğlu's claim, later disputed by Trump, has political overtones despite Turkey framing it as a criminal case. Gülen is not accused of any crimes in the U.S.

Trump began taking an interest in A$AP Rocky's case after Kanye West, the rap star, and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, brought it to the White House’s attention. But the president has appeared to treat the incident as an international hostage crisis, dispatching Robert O'Brien, a presidential envoy for hostage affairs, to the trial in Stockholm. The State Department said O'Brien traveled at the White House's request.

In an interview, O'Brien told USA TODAY that it was "entirely appropriate" for him to attend the trial despite it being a criminal case. "When foreign governments hold American citizens it's always appropriate," he added when challenged over whether it sent the wrong signal to Sweden's government, a longstanding American ally.

"The president sent me. That also makes it appropriate," he said.

Meanwhile, Trump expressed little interest in the case of Francisco Erwin Galicia, an 18-year-old U.S. citizen who was detained in federal immigration custody for nearly a month. Authorities questioned the authenticity of Galicia’s identity documents when he was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Texas. He was released last week.

Trump has also mostly shrugged off the dismembering of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi national but U.S.-resident who was killed inside the kingdom’s embassy in Istanbul in October last year. A United Nations probe reported "credible evidence" that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a major ally of the Trump administration, bore responsibility for the killing.

"We're headed into a campaign year, and it may be no coincidence that the person Trump is advocating for is a popular African-American rapper," said Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, adding that Trump might be trying to counter some of the criticism he received for his recent attacks on four Democratic congresswomen who have challenged his policies from immigration to climate change.

"The criminal justice system of a socialistic European country that is fairly homogeneous and very white. All of that might have been irresistible to him."

'All Trump can see is the propaganda'

Of the two dozen Swedes USA TODAY encountered across Stockholm while reporting this story only a few believed, contrary to Trump's suggestion that Sweden was letting "our African American community down," that the color of A$AP Rocky’s skin played a role in his detention. All thought the authorities were handling the case correctly and the performer, despite a single TMZ report, was being treated well, and fairly. They also pointed out that the plaintiff, Jafari, is himself an ethnic minority immigrant.

"There’s not much to read into it," said Leo Nyström, a communications manager. "The Swedish state believe he committed a crime. So he's being tried for that crime."

And back in Rinkeby and other relatively deprived immigrant districts of Stockholm, residents are adamant that Trump has got the country all wrong, although they acknowledge that there are vulnerable areas in Sweden just like any other country.

Shortly after Trump, in 2017, made the false claim about a terror attack in Sweden, several dozen masked men in Rinkeby started riots that led to half a dozen cars being burned out and vandalized storefronts. Crowds threw rocks at police and a journalist was attacked and beaten. Rinkeby was also the site of riots in 2013, and in 2010 about 100 youths threw bricks, set fires and attacked the neighborhood’s local police station.

"Since Trump hasn't been to this area he's not entitled to talk about what it's like,” said Abshir Osman, 17, who was working in a youth club in Tensta, which is next to Rinkeby, in northern Stockholm. Osman’s parents are from Somalia. He lives in a four-room apartment with them and eight of his siblings. Tensta has been branded by right-wing U.S. media such as Breitbart, Russia's Sputnik and some Swedish tabloid newspapers as a "no-gone" zone because of its foreign-born population.

"All Trump can see is the propaganda. This area is multicultural, that’s true, but it’s also very friendly, people will help you even if they don’t know you. We have Muslims, Jews, Christians. We all live together with out any major problems," said Osman, painting an extremely rosy picture of a neighborhood Swedish police have identified as a "problem area" because of its high crime rates and low socioeconomic status.

About 19% of Swedish residents were born abroad in 2018, up from 11% a decade ago, according to Sweden Statistics, a government agency. Immigrants account for 13.6% of the U.S. population, triple the share in 1970, according to the Pew Research Center. The U.S. numbers are from 2017 census data, the most recent available.

"It’s wonderful that Swedes have big hearts and want to help people (through liberal immigration policies)," said Ami Horowitz, a New York-based filmmaker who made a documentary in 2016 about Sweden’s immigrant neighborhoods that portrayed places like Rinkeby and Tensta as unsafe and largely out of the control of Swedish authorities.

When USA TODAY visited these areas many residents were disinclined to speak with the media and quickly left the immediate area to avoid answering questions.

They don't trust the press here.

Horowitz was beaten up while making his film.

It highlighted what he claimed – and what the Swedish government and the vast majority of social scientists here such as Stockholm University criminologist Jerzy Sarnecki dispute – was a runaway immigration policy that led to an increase in rape and murder.

Horowitz was interviewed about his film on FOX News, and Trump indirectly referred to it in his speech mentioning Sweden at the campaign-style rally in Florida in 2017.

"My only point is that you have to be real about the social consequences of such an immigration policy," Horowitz said of his film, which continues to be widely vilified in Sweden for its inaccurate and selective reporting, an allegation Horowitz disputes.

Horowitz said he believes Trump periodically brings up Sweden in his speeches and tweets because it represents a "liberal bastion that in a lot ways is very different from the United States … Democratic socialism, open immigration policy, high taxes, welfare state, there’s no question Sweden is a paradigm of things the president doesn’t like."

'Trump doesn’t mention Norway that much'

Earlier this year, the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party, became the third-largest political group in Sweden following an election where its support surged after Sweden accepted 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015, at the height of a refugee crisis in Europe. At the time, Sweden accepted more asylum seekers on a proportional basis than any other nation in the region, including Germany, which accepted 1 million.

Germany, and its Chancellor Angela Merkel, is also a frequent Trump target.

Sweden has since tightened its asylum laws. It is now more difficult, for example, for parents to be reunited with their children. Permanent residency is harder to acquire.

For political liberals, it can be hard to see what Trump objects to about Sweden.

Along with other Nordic countries such as Denmark, Finland and Norway, Sweden routinely tops global rankings that measure "quality of life" aspects such as access to food and housing, education and health care, job security, political stability, human rights and the environment. Sweden took the No. 2 spot after Canada in U.S. News and World Report's 2019 "Best Countries" ranking. The U.S. came in at No. 17.

Comparing crime data across nations is difficult because of the way countries track and record these data differently. However, since 2002, the number of incidents of lethal violence in Sweden has varied between 68 and 113 cases per year, according to Sweden's National Crime Survey. The Swedish Crime Agency defines lethal violence as inclusive of murder, manslaughter and assault with a deadly outcome.

In the U.S. in 2017, the latest year for which data are available, there were 17,284 murders, according to the FBI. This translates as 1 murder per 20,000 people. In Sweden, the lethal violence rate is approximately 1 per 88,000 people.

Last year, Sweden's generous social benefits and commitment to gender equality, earned it the "most reputable country" in the world, according to one annual ranking.

"Sweden is like a paradise to me: the food, the culture, the smell,” said Iywb Sharif, 26, who is originally from Somalia. He is a social worker and lives in Norway.

However, the "paradise" Sharif was talking about wasn’t the meatballs you can buy at IKEA, the Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture giant, or the fashionable clothes available at Hennes & Mauritz, the nation’s multinational clothing-retail company that is a mainstay of most European capital cities. Sharif was talking about Rinkeby.

He was visiting for a couple of days to attend a friend's wedding.

Since arriving in Norway as a teenager he has embraced the country.

But the cafes in Rinkeby with groups of African men hunched over small tables drinking coffee and discussing politics; the aroma wafting from kebab stands; women in headscarves: Rinkeby reminded Sharif of home – Somalia.

"Trump doesn’t mention Norway that much," he reflected.

Except that Trump has.

"We should have more people from Norway," Trump said last year, a country he mentioned while making derogatory comments about other countries of migration.