In yet another WTF moment uncovered from President Donald Trump’s disastrous meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel last weekend, The Sunday Times is reporting that Trump actually serviced the German leader with a fake invoice for $300 billion, for NATO services. From the piece:
Donald Trump handed the German chancellor Angela Merkel a bill — thought to be for more than £300bn — for money her country “owed” NATO for defending it when they met last weekend, German government sources have revealed.
The bill — handed over during private talks in Washington — was described as “outrageous” by one German minister.
“The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister said.
To be clear, this is not how NATO works, and Germany doesn’t owe the US any such moneys. But at this point, we apparently can’t expect the president to know how NATO works at all. Following Trump’s staggeringly bleak interview with Time Magazine last week, The Washington Post took to saying that he literally has no idea how the alliance functions, and two tweets from the president hint at this fact.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/843088518339612673
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/843090516283723776
This led to a rebuke from Germany’s defense minister, as well as an excoriating twitter thread from the former US ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder:
2/ This is not a financial transaction, where NATO countries pay the US to defend them. It is part of our treaty commitment.
— Ivo Daalder (@IvoHDaalder) March 18, 2017
3/ All NATO countries, including Germany, have committed to spend 2% of GDP on defense by 2024. So far 5 of 28 NATO countries do.
— Ivo Daalder (@IvoHDaalder) March 18, 2017
Click through to learn some basics Trump apparently does not grasp. Our current president’s levels of pettiness and stupidity continue to astound us.
UPDATE 3/27: A spokesman for the German government has denied that Trump presented Merkel with a bill, according to Politico.
“Reports that President Trump had presented the federal chancellor with a kind of bill with a concrete billion sum are not true,” spokesman Steffen Seibert said at a press conference.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer has also denied the report.
