Advertisement

Trump tells blatant lie about NATO, then takes credit for Obama-era agreement

Fake news.

CREDIT: SCREENGRAB
CREDIT: SCREENGRAB

Trump began his news conference at the end of the NATO summit in Belgium on Thursday with a blatant lie about what percentage of the alliance’s funding the United States covers.

“The United States has been paying a tremendous amount — probably 90 percent of the cost of NATO,” Trump said. “So I let [other countries] know… that I was extremely unhappy with what was happening, and they have substantially upped their commitment, yeah, and now we’re very happy, and have a very, very powerful, very, very strong NATO — much stronger than it was two days ago.”

Trump’s claim about the United States paying “probably 90 percent of the cost of NATO” is egregiously false. The United States, which spends more than twice as much on defense as the second biggest-spending country in the world (China), currently covers about 22 percent of the cost of NATO.

Advertisement

But Trump’s lie about NATO illustrates how he uses repetition to launder false claims. Before he left for the NATO summit on Monday, Trump tweeted that “By some accounts, the U.S. is paying for 90% of NATO.”

It’s unclear where Trump got this fake percentage from. But instead of correcting his false information, Trump repeated the lie on Thursday. Meanwhile, Fox News is spreading false information about U.S. contributions to NATO that echoes Trump’s talking point.

After lying about U.S. contributions to NATO, Trump tried to take credit for military spending increases that member countries actually agreed to in 2014.

Advertisement

“If you ask [NATO] Secretary General [Jens] Stoltenberg, he gives us total credit — meaning me, I guess, total credit, because I said it was unfair,” he said.

Despite the 2014 agreement, on Wednesday, the Trump administration abruptly requested that NATO member nations double their defense spending target from the current 2 to 4 percent.

Later during his news conference, Trump indicated he hopes NATO members will use their increased military expenditures to buy American equipment, which he described as “so much better than anybody else’s.”