“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said at a rally in Conway, South Carolina. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”
“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
The White House later Saturday called Trump’s remarks “appalling and unhinged” and touted President Joe Biden’s efforts to bolster the alliance.
“President Biden has restored our alliances and made us stronger in the world because he knows every commander in chief’s first responsibility is to keep the American people safe and hold true to the values that unite us. … Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability, and our economy at home,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement.
At the core of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the promise of collective defense — that an attack on one member nation is an attack on all the nations in the alliance. Trump has long complained about the amount other countries in NATO spend on defense compared with the United States and has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the US from NATO. But his comments Saturday are his most direct indication he does not intend to defend NATO allies from Russian attack if he is reelected.
Trump has for years inaccurately described how NATO funding works. NATO has a target that each member country spends a minimum of 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, and most countries are not meeting that target. But the figure is a guideline and not a binding contract, nor does it create “bills”; member countries haven’t been failing to pay their share of NATO’s common budget to run the organization.
As president, Trump privately threatened multiple times to withdraw the United States from NATO, according to The New York Times. Trump has described NATO as “obsolete” and has aligned himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to weaken the alliance. Trump has long praised Putin and went as far as to side with the Russian leader over the US intelligence community over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Kaanita Iyer, Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen, Veronica Stracqualursi, Jim Acosta and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
