What Trump did in private during the NATO summit last month was apparently far, far worse than his public embarrassment of the American people in which he literally shoved the prime minister of Montenegro out of the way (pictured above) so he could stand in front.
According to a report from Foreign Policy, Trump discarded his prepared remarks for their dinner meeting and winged it.
Several sources briefed extensively on the dinner say he said 2 percent [defense spending] wasn’t enough and allies should spend 3 percent of GDP on defense, and he even threatened to cut back U.S. defense spending and have Europeans dole out “back pay” to make up for their low defense spending if they didn’t pony up quickly enough. Two sources say Trump didn’t mention Russia once during the dinner.
“Oh, it was like a total shitshow,” said one source, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to discuss the closed-door dinner.
“The dinner was far worse than the speech,” said a former senior U.S. government official briefed on dinner. “It was a train wreck. It was awful.”
I think everyone who will read this understands but, to be clear, NATO countries do not pay us or each other. They don't owe us money. It doesn't work that way. Every member of the alliance has their own military and their own defense budget. Furthermore, we are not spending money on them. It's not as if we're funding their military. They don't owe "back pay" or protection money.
And Trump is never going to "cut back U.S. defense spending." That doesn't even make sense in this context.
Given what we know now, it's even less surprising that European leaders publicly aired their contempt for Trump after the meeting. His refusal to publicly affirm our commitment to mutual defense under Article 5 was barely half of it. He also impotently threatened every member of the alliance with extortion.
Trump spoke to a room of world leaders and every single one of them learned in that moment, if they didn't already know, that Trump is a clueless, simpleton thug.