Trump, April 4: And Wolf Blitzer asked me a question on television. He said, let me just ask you about NATO. And he asked me about it. Now, I haven’t been asked about NATO a lot, but I understand NATO and I understand common sense and I’m, like, a smart person, like many of the people in this room, hopefully all of the people in this room.
But he asked me about NATO. I said it’s obsolete. This is my first thing. And you know what? I’m the first one. Guys that study NATO and good people, but they study NATO and they say, I don’t believe it, what he just said, I never thought of that. They study it because they’re so into it that they don’t realize.
Because it was really put there — you had the Soviet Union and now you have Russia, which is different, but Russia is very powerful, so we can sort of say that’s a balance, so we’ll leave it.
But it doesn’t really cover terrorism like it’s supposed to. It doesn’t have the right countries. I mean, many of the countries in there aren’t, you know, that you associate with terrorism.
And so I said, number one, it’s obsolete. I said, number two, to the best of my knowledge,
the United States pays far too much proportionately, and why are we always paying the bills to protect other people?
And the press, which is so totally dishonest, the press goes headlines the next day “Trump doesn’t want NATO, wants to disband.” That’s not what I said.
I said you’ve got to pay your bills. And you know what? If they can’t pay their bills, honestly there should be — they’ve got to go. Because we can’t do this