'He doesn't understand the treaty': Ex-Trump official reveals his total ignorance of NATO
Former President Donald Trump's latest comments suggesting he'd encourage Russia to attack NATO states if they don't pay for protection reveals his ignorance of how the basic international security order works, former White House official Anthony Scaramucci told CNN on Monday.
"What do you think, having been so close to the president?" anchor Poppy Harlow asked him.
"Well, he wanted out in 2016," said Scaramucci. "He didn't like the treaty in 2016. And so he told everybody during the term that if he got re-elected, he would do everything he could to pull the us out of NATO, you know... He doesn't really understand the treaty. No one's actually sat down with them to explain the treaty."
"What drives me insane, like how, how I remember when this happened in — right before the convention in 2016 where he first weighed in on this and it was like a bomb dropped, right?" said anchor Phil Mattingly. "And I assumed at some point over the course of the next eight years, someone would have sat down and said, let me explain to you how percent of GDP means x, y, and z."
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"But to really understand him, you can't explain something to them because he doesn't want to appear that he doesn't know something," said Scaramucci, saying that Trump "doesn't want to be lectured by anybody" and the only way he learns anything is if you regale him with a story — for example, he added, he would ask Trump to think about the film "Lawrence of Arabia" whenever he wanted to prime him to listen about Middle East politics.
What Trump fundamentally doesn't understand, he continued, is that "Vladimir Putin has called for objectively reattaching republics to the former Soviet Union. He's doing something right now, that's a direct violation of international law."
The U.S. didn't respond aggressively enough when he annexed Crimea, Scaramucci said, thinking that he'd stop there, and then he invaded all of Ukraine — and Trump is prepared to make the same mistake.
"When Mr. Trump is talking like that, he's going after the interests of the United States and he's going after the footprint of global peace and global prosperity," he said. "So why people are not explaining that the American people ... President Biden's got to get out there and explain what a disaster this guy would be if he returned to the presidency. This would be — this would harm the everyday citizen in the United States and it would raise the cost of capital for people here in the United States, because we'd have more wars going on."
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