Trump threatened a trade war with Sweden over A$AP Rocky’s arrest (2024)

Donald Trump threatened Sweden with a trade war in an attempt to secure the release of a US rapper detained in Stockholm on assault charges, according to the Nordic country’s justice minister.

Rakim Mayers, better known by his stage name A$AP Rocky, was arrested by Swedish police in 2019 after he and two of his bodyguards were filmed beating a young man who had been badgering them outside a burger restaurant.

The incident blew up into an angry transatlantic dispute, with fellow hip hop stars such as Tyler the Creator announcing boycotts of Sweden and claiming that Mayers, now 33, had been a victim of racism.

Other celebrities including Rod Stewart, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian took up Mayers’s cause and some of his fans refused to buy furniture from Ikea, the Swedish chain.

Trump, the US president at the time, quickly leapt on the bandwagon after he was alerted to the case by his wife Melania and the rapper Kanye West, a friend of Mayers.

In a barrage of tweets and at least one phone call to the Swedish prime minister, Trump lobbied for the rapper’s release, accusing Sweden of “letting down” African-Americans and being ungrateful for American support. He also offered to personally bail Mayers out of custody, although there is no such mechanism in Swedish criminal law.

Behind the scenes, he resorted to even blunter techniques. Morgan Johansson, the Swedish justice minister who handled the negotiations, said Trump had vowed to impose “trade restrictions” if Mayers was not set free. He said he had been so alarmed that he asked the European Commission in Brussels for backup.

“If you can try and do something like this against Sweden, what will you then try and do to slightly weaker countries that don’t have the European Union behind them?” Johansson told Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper. “This story demonstrates how important it really is to stand up for our legal principles and not to take our democracy for granted.”

Johansson said Trump had been represented in the talks by Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel at the time, who spoke to the Swedish side from the situation room.

Over the next hour the Swedes tried to explain that political interventions in the justice system were impossible under their country’s constitution and that they had no sway over the prosecution.

Cipollone asked Johansson to invoke an obscure legal tool known as abolition, which allows the government to involve itself in criminal cases of overriding national security significance.

This instrument has not been used in Sweden for almost half a century since far-left terrorists attacked the West German embassy in Stockholm.

Mayers, who insisted he had been acting in self-defence, was ultimately held in custody for a month and then found guilty of assault. He was permitted to return to the US with a suspended sentence.

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