As well he should. Backing out of our agreements makes us weak and unreliable. Maybe if we stopped going about things with a military first approach spending an absurd amount on maintaining a military that out spends the next several countries combined it wouldn’t look like we’re shouldering such an outsized measure of the costs.
We spend enough on some single piece of hardware that we could house the population of a small city and complain that others don’t do the same. Protecting the population means more than funneling money into the pockets of contractors.
We don’t even need to spend that much money to have the military we have. So much military spending just goes through a daisy chain of unnecessary middlemen. Scrape away all that extra corruption residue and we would be spending a fraction of what we are now.
Does anyone have a link showing what actual American conservatives are saying about Trump’s quote? How are they trying to defend this? (Not the media - actual people, on the street, as it were)
I am more than a little bit doubtful that they’ve heard anything about it. On the Fox News website, I can find exactly two articles about it:
One titled “Trump’s NATO comments trigger fierce media and European opposition: How serious is he?,” which focuses more on European response to the message (and in fairness does have some pretty strong words for Trump’s statement), but was written by Howard Kurtz, who is generally considered a “RINO” or worse by rank & file MAGAts. That article currently has about 500 comments.
And one titled “White House responds to Trump encouraging Russia to do ‘whatever’ they want to some NATO members: ‘Unhinged’,” which focuses (as suggested by the headline) more on the White House’s response to Trump’s statement than on the statement itself, before going on to provide an apologia for Trump’s remarks in the form of a weird, pseudo-self-righteous paraphrase of a section of the NATO charter. That article currently has about 4,500 comments.
The big comments on both articles are either regurgitations of Trump’s statement itself, regurgitations of the apologia in the second article, or a spectrum from “he was just using a rhetorical device to make a point” up to “I support him, countries that don’t pay should be punished.”
They will likely never even know about this. Right wing media is incredibly insulated. They live in a different reality most of the time. They’re programmed to shut out and discount any and all information that doesn’t fit with their worldview.
That constitution was a power grab by wealthy land and slave owners puffed out with shrewd sophistry aimed at placating the common stock. There is nothing in the root ethos of the country that is inherently good, noble or magnanimous.
I disagree, he’s loud, ignorant, has more money than braincells, and he’s proud of it all. He might not line up with what you proclaim your values are, but he sure lines up with reality.
This is what I was thinking, you don’t even need to go back more than a few good decades while the ussr is still around and you’ve got repubs saying Dems are traitors and in bed with the ussr. Reagan is rolling in his grave right now watching these Republicans.
“AIDING AND COMFORTING OUR ENEMIES” was what they cried out when a Democrat question Iraq. Somehow, Republicans have convinced hordes of Americans that’s it’s the Dems who uphold neoconservatism when all that Democrats want to do is stop a valuable and trustworthy ally from collapsing.
He’s probably talking about Obama’s “hot mic” gaffe, where he told Medvedev (not Putin) that he would have “more flexibility” on negotiations (about the NATO missile defense system) after the election.
It’s a real thing that really happened, but it’s also a GOP talking point that first Romney and then a whole bunch of House Republicans picked up and ran with for pretty much Obama’s entire second term. But the NATO Missile Defense System was built despite Romney’s doomsaying; that said, McConnell and his do-nothing congress managed to reduce funding for the system during the first half of Trump’s administration, so that it’s behind schedule now.
He told that to Medvedev, not Putin. It was about negotiations with regard to the NATO Missile Defense System, and that system exists today (though it is behind schedule partially due to congressional budget decisions).
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