He picked a hell of a time, what with Ukraine getting mercilessly raped by Russia for all the world to see, to lay this humdinger on the folks in attendance at a Heritage Foundation pow-wow:
Former President Donald Trump told a conference on Thursday that he once told a NATO country leader that the U.S. would not protect NATO members from a Russian attack if they did not pay more into the alliance.
Trump made the headline-grabbing remarks while giving the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s leadership conference on Amelia Island, Florida. The remarks quickly reverberated throughout the news media as pundits and observers noted the remarks were Trump’s “most explicit statement to date” about breaking NATO treaty commitments.
“Everyone was delinquent, they didn’t pay,” Trump told the crowd at the Ritz Carlton. “And they asked me, one of the presidents of the countries at a closed meeting…he said, ‘Does that mean that you won’t protect us in case – if we don’t pay, you won’t protect us from Russia — was the Soviet Union but now Russia?’”
“I said, ‘That’s exactly what it means,'” Trump continued, claiming he would violate the treaty’s key mutual protection clause. “Now, if I said, ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ then why would they pay? So somebody had to say it. I was amazed it didn’t get out. I was amazed. The fake news didn’t pull it out.”
“The money started to flow in,” Trump added, noting his threat to break the treaty’s Article 5 provision was very “risky.”
Just remember: he's still the frontrunner among names discussed as GOP presidential candidates in 2024.
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