On the 13th day of the government shutdown, President Donald Trump sat down with reporters in the White House cabinet room, but he asked “what” more times than he coherently answered any questions.
Trump has been bullying his way around NATO as if the alliance were his personal service group. Recently, he made statements about kicking out Spain, a member country for 43 years, from the alliance. His reasons? Spain isn’t letting him boss them around and make important financial decisions for them. But when he was asked about his statements against Spain that he had made only five days ago, he appeared as clueless as a dummy.
The reporter asked a clear question: “Last week, you said NATO should consider expelling Spain. Would you support that?” But Trump, either hard of hearing or intellect, or both, could not understand the simple question. So, his personal assistant, Vance, had to step in. When he finally understood the question after two repetitions, his response was: “I’m very unhappy with Spain.”
This crusade first began on Thursday, Oct. 9, when the White House was hosting fellow NATO member, Finland. While speaking to the press after the meeting, Trump complained that Spain refuses to adhere to the new defense spending target for NATO, which he proposed should be increased to 5%. This was the top agenda item of the alliance when they met in June, but Spain had refused to follow up with it.
Calling the country a “laggard,” Trump boastfully took credit for Spain’s progress and arrogantly bashed it for not taking orders from him. Then, he proposed a radical idea to “throw them out of NATO.” What he’s missing is that there is no clause to remove or suspend a member of NATO; only a clause on quitting is mentioned in Article 13 of the organization’s founding treaty.
This was also discussed in 2019 when the question mark was over Turkey, after they purchased Russian air defense missiles. So, Trump can bash Spain all he wants, but he can’t harm the country’s membership anyhow. But in his signature arrogance, he still announced revenge against Spain:
“What we’re gonna do, we’re negotiating with Spain on a trade deal, we’re going to make them pay twice as much. And I’m actually serious about that.”
And it’s all because a country’s leader thinking about their own people before anyone else might be an alien idea to the MAGA madman. Spain has refused to comply with the spending increase because it would mean increasing taxes on the country’s middle class and cutting spending on other areas like foreign aid and green transition.
An increase from the current 2% to 5% would also mean that Spain would have to buy weapons from other countries, which would inevitably hurt the country’s domestic industry. But nobody expects Trump to understand any of that. He has also been appearing visibly slow in all his public appearances, something he always bashed former President Biden for. Users on X took a jab at this, calling Trump “Grandpa” and quipping that he’s “sundowning.”
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