| During a second Trump term, Trump has made it clear that he will mimic the worlds worst dictators. |
| During his term in the White House, Mr. Trump came close more than once to pulling the United States out of NATO altogether, only to be talked out of it by his advisers. But if he is elected again, he will not have the same advisers around him. He may not need to even formally withdraw to effectively gut the alliance since Article V would no longer be viewed as inviolate.
Indeed, as he has done repeatedly over the years, Mr. Trump distorted how NATO works, making it sound like the allies were supposed to pay the United States. In fact, at issue has been how much each member is to spend on its own military. And while his browbeating may have been one reason some members did increase their investments during his tenure, he overstated how much progress was made. Mr. Biden, by contrast, has overseen a far greater increase in spending by NATO members. That, of course, may owe less to either American president than it does to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that terrified European allies. In Mr. Trump’s last year in office, just nine NATO members were meeting the target of spending 2 percent of their national economies on their armed forces ahead of a 2024 goal. Since Mr. Biden took over, that number has grown to 23. Mr. Biden likewise presided over the addition of two important new members to NATO, Sweden and Finland, bringing the alliance to 32 members. {W}hile NATO leaders in Washington condemned Mr. Putin for his unprovoked war, which included an attack this week on a children’s hospital, Mr. Trump remarked on his close friendship with the Russian leader. Source: "NATO on the Edge: Biden Praises and Trump Denigrates a 75-Year Alliance" By Peter Baker - NY Times - 7/11/24 Ever since he gave an interview to Playboy magazine in 1990 decrying Mikhail Gorbachev for failing to hold the Soviet empire together (“not a firm enough hand”) and praising the Chinese Communist leadership for crushing the student uprising at Tiananmen Square (“they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength”), Mr. Trump has extolled authoritarian leaders as possessing the right stuff, while he has dismissed democratic ones as weak and feckless. Source: "The Real Danger if Trump Is Re-elected" By Jacob Heilbrunn - NY Times - 5/20/2024 (Mr. Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author, most recently, of “America Last.”) Former President Donald Trump posted a video to Truth Social Thursday night {5/16/24} portraying hypothetical headlines about a second Trump term. Beneath one is text about "the creation of a unified reich." Last fall, Trump called his opponents "vermin," and in an interview with a far-right website said that immigrants were "poisoning the blood" of the nation — language that echoed Adolf Hitler. In early 2016, he at one point declined to disavow the support he was receiving from white supremacists including former KKK grand wizard David Duke. And as president in 2017, he responded to the violence during a Charlottesville, Va., white nationalist rally by declaring there to be "very fine people on both sides." Source: "Trump posted a video on Truth Social calling the country a 'unified reich' if he wins" Danielle Kurtzleben - NPR.org - 5/21/2024 Laura Belmonte, a history professor and the dean of the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, told the BBC: "The moment I found jaw-dropping was the press conference Trump had with Vladimir Putin in 2018 in Helsinki, where he took Putin’s side over U.S. intelligence in regard to Russian interference in the election. I can’t think of another episode of a president siding full force with a nondemocratic society adversary." In addition, Belmonte said she was struck by “Trump’s applauding Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, really turning himself inside out to align the U.S. with regimes that are the antithesis of values that the U.S. says it wants to promote.” Source: "What Trump Looks Like to Historians" By Thomas B. Edsall - NY Times - 5/22/2024 |
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