Thursday, April 13, 2017

And you thought everything Obama said came with an expiration date: Trump in March 2016 NATO is obsolete, Trump in April 2017 not so much

Here in March 2016:

TRUMP: I think NATO is obsolete. NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger -- much larger than Russia is today. I'm not saying Russia is not a threat. ... What I'm saying is NATO is obsolete. NATO is -- is obsolete and it's extremely expensive for the United States, disproportionately so. And we should readjust NATO. ... You know, there's nothing wrong with saying that a concept was good, but now it's obsolete or now it's outmoded. Now, it can be trimmed up and it can be, uh, it can be reconfigured and you can call it NATO, but it's going to be changed. I mean this thing was -- was done many decades ago. And there's nothing wrong with saying it's obsolete. But it is obsolete.

Here the same in January 2017:

Trump used the interview to restate his doubts about NATO. "I said a long time ago that NATO had problems," he said in the interview. "Number one it was obsolete, because it was designed many, many years ago. "Number two the countries weren't paying what they're supposed to be paying," adding that this was unfair to the United States.

But now in April, here:

"The Secretary General and I had a productive discussion about what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism. I complained about that and now they fight terrorism. I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete," Trump said Wednesday.