Shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress via satellite link on Wednesday morning, failed, one-term former President Donald Trump issued a statement in which he proudly bragged that he had threatened NATO with “no protection” while he was still in office.
The statement, which was posted to Twitter by the ex-president’s spokesperson, Liz Harrington (because he remains banned from the social media platform), reads:
“People forget so quickly with the help of Fake News that it was me that got the 20 out of 28 delinquent NATO countries to start paying the money that they owed in order to rebuild a floundering NATO. Nobody knew things would happen so rapidly but NATO was poor and now it is rich and all of the Fake News commentators that said Trump was tearing down NATO should be ashamed of themselves for telling lies.
“Bush and Obama did nothing but make speeches and talk. I acted, and acted strongly. I said to them, ‘if you don’t pay up, no protection.’ They all paid up, and quickly. It’s a story that’s never reported but only because we have a corrupt press in our Country!”
In other words, Trump is admitting that he extorted NATO the same way he did Ukraine when he said he would release military aid to the Ukrainians if they would agree to look for dirt on his 2020 opponent, Joe Biden.
Zelensky, it should be noted, was incredibly powerful and poignant in his speech to Congress, evoking the memory of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as he pleaded for a no-fly zone over Ukraine:
“Remember Pearl Harbor, terrible morning of December 7, 1941, when your sky was black from the planes attacking you. Just remember it, remember, September the 11th, a terrible day in 2001 when evil tried to turn US cities into battlefields, when innocent people were attacked from air, just like nobody else expected it and you could not stop it. Our country experiences the same, every day, right now at this moment.”
