Trump Gets Slammed After Trying To Take Credit For NATO

In an email to reporters on Monday, Donald Trump tried to take credit for NATO in Europe by lying about getting members to "pay their dues." The truth is that there are no dues for NATO, and Trump has been making this false claim for years with little pushback. He isn't responsible for any of the success or failure of NATO in recent years, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

On Monday in an email to reporters, because of course he doesn't have social media anymore, at least a social media that anybody wants to see, Donald Trump said that he is the reason that NATO is being so successful in Europe right now as Russia continues their invasion of Ukraine. Here's what Trump said in the email. I hope everyone is able to remember that it was me as president of the United States that got delinquent NATO members to start paying their dues, which amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars. There would be no NATO if I didn't act strongly and swiftly. Also it was me that got Ukraine the very effective anti tank busters when the previous administration was sending blankets. Let history so note. Um, none of that is true, by the way. Donald Trump was the one who actually threatened to pull the United States out of NATO. That was his plan. And of course, multiple times during his administration, he did come out and say, hey, NATO countries, you gotta pay your bills. US is paying our bills. You owe us lots of money. And it was pointed out at the time.

So it's worth pointing it out again because he's spreading the lie once more, that that's not how NATO works. Um, there are no delinquent countries as members of NATO. It, it, it's not a golf club, Donald Trump. You don't have your yearly membership dues. What you have are pledges from countries to give what they can as a percentage of their GDP. And the United States, sure, has a larger GDP than any of these other NATO countries. So sure we paid more because our country was bigger and we benefited more from NATO existing. These other countries with smaller economies, you know, paying one and a half to two and a half percent of their GDP to be part of NATO. That's what the original agreement was. And that's what these countries signed onto and they were in fact doing it. What he wanted was for them to pay an equal share for what the United States was paying. And that was just impossible for these countries. Again, the United States had more to lose, so therefore more to gain by being in NATO. So of course we paid more. Bigger economy, bigger country, more land. So yes, we pay a lot for it because we reap most of the benefits from it.

Trump didn't save NATO. Trump almost destroyed NATO. And again, lots of arguments right now about NATO expanding over to the West and that's what Russia's so mad about. You know, Ukraine right now trying to join the European union, not NATO as far as we can tell. It, it's all a bunch of talk from people who don't quite understand what is happening, to be perfectly honest with you. You know, these people who claim that they're so anti-war right. They're the real good guys here. We all know who those talking heads are right now, saying that, this is NATO's fault. This is Joe Biden's war. NATO did this by trying to push these countries to join. Maybe there's some truth to that. Not a whole heck of a lot, as far as I can see. NATO is not an aggressor. Is it a perfect organization? Absolutely not. And sometimes yes, they do things that are absolutely objectionable, things that I do not agree with, but they exist for a reason. Maybe they've lost their ways a little bit. But countries wanting to join it, NATO wanting to expand, probably a good thing, right? Let's all be a part of this defense organization. Let's reform it. Let's make it better.

Let's prevent unnecessary wars, which again is why NATO was dreamed up in the first place. That's what I think a lot of people are missing.