A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
initially did not want to provide
Javelins to Ukraine, but
eventually aides convinced him
that it could be good for U.S.
business. Nevertheless, the sale
was mostly symbolic. At the time,
the Trump administration
insisted that the Javelins could
not be deployed in a conflict zone,
so they were s tored in western
Ukraine, far from the front lines
of the ongoing conflict against
pro-Russian separatists in
eastern Ukraine.
In a call on July 25, 2019,
Trump asked for “a favor” after
Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky said Ukraine was ready
to buy more Javelins. That favor
involved launching an
investigation in Ukraine of Joe
Biden. That request led to
Trump’s first impeachment. A s
part of his effort to pressure
Zelensky, Trump placed a hold on
U.S. assistance to Ukraine —
$250 million of aid through the
Defense Department and
$141 million of aid through the
State Department — that already
had been appropriated by
Congress.
U.S. officials became
increasingly frantic about the
Ukraine aid freeze because fiscal
2019 ended Sept. 30, after which
the appropriation would expire.
The hold was finally lifted in mid-
September, only after intense
pressure from members of
Congress on both sides of the
aisle, but it takes time for the U.S.
government to transfer such
funds. It turned out that about
$35 million of the aid could not be
disbursed by the Sept. 30
deadline. For the money to go
through, Congress had to extend
the deadline to fiscal 2020.the withdrawal of 12,0 00 U.S.
troops, about one-third of the
force based there. When Biden
became president, he quickly
reversed the plan.
Bolton, in an interview Friday
with Post opinions editor at large
Michael Duffy, said: “In a second
Trump term, I think he may well
have withdrawn from NATO. And
I think [Russian President
Vladimir] Putin was waiting for
that.”
“Also, it was me that got
Ukraine the very effective
antitank busters (Javelins)
when the previous
Administration was sending
blankets.”
Trump yet again minimizes the
materiel provided to Ukraine by
Barack Obama’s administration.
While the Obama administration
did not send lethal aid, in 2015 it
provided Ukraine more than
$120 million of security
assistance and had pledged an
additional $75 million worth of
equipment including drones,
armored Humvees, counter-
mortar radars, night-vision
devices and medical supplies,
according to the Pentagon’s
Defense Security Cooperation
Agency.
Many of these same items were
provided by the Trump
administration, but in March
2018, the White House also
approved the sale of Javelin
missiles, a shoulder-fired
precision missile system designed
to destroy tanks, other armored
vehicles and helicopters. One
issue the Obama administration
faced is that some U.S. officials
were concerned that the
Ukrainian military did not have
the capability to handle weapons
such as Javelins, but it achieved
that capability by the time Trump
became president.
Ironically, Foreign Policy
magazine reported, Trumptold aides he wanted the United
States to leave NATO.
“Trump told his top national
security officials that he did not
see the point of the military
alliance, which he presented as a
drain on the United States,” the
New York Times reported in 2019.
That reporting was confirmed
when Trump’s former national
security adviser John Bolton
published a memoir in 2020 that
described Trump as repeatedly
saying he wanted to quit the
alliance, saying at one point, “I
don’t give a s--- about NATO.”
Bolton said he had to persuade
Trump not to quit NATO in the
middle of a 2018 summit.
Trump’s former chief of staff
John F. Kelly, a retired four-star
Marine general, was also
described in a 2020 book by New
York Times reporter Michael D.
Schmidt as saying that “one of the
most difficult tasks he faced with
Trump was trying to stop him
from pulling out of NATO.”
When Trump ran for
reelection, it was generally feared
he would pull out of the alliance if
he won. In a fit of pique at
Germany, Trump in 2020 ordered$700 billion budget. What Trump
really is referring to is indirect
spending — what NATO members
spend on their own defense.
Trump claimed NATO
members were “delinquent,” but
that is not the right way to frame
it. NATO members are supposed
to meet a guideline of spending at
least 2 percent of their gross
domestic product on defense by
202 4 — a process that had started
before Trump became president.
He also often asserted that
NATO spending was at a low
point when he came into office,
but that’s also not true. It had
fallen after the end of the Cold
War but had started rising
sharply after 2014, after Russia
seized Crimea from Ukraine.
NATO estimates that European
NATO members and Canada
added $130 billion in cumulative
defense spending through 2020,
in 2015 dollars, as an increase
over 2016 spending. NATO also
estimates that the cumulative
figure will rise to $400 billion
through 2024.
“There would be no NATO if I
didn’t act strongly and swiftly.”
In reality, Trump repeatedlystatement.
“It was me, as President of the
United States, that got
delinquent NATO members to
start paying their dues, which
amounted to hundreds of
billions of dollars.”
During the 2016 presidential
election, Trump consistently
inflated the U.S. contribution to
NATO. Once he became president,
his inaccuracy persisted, but with a
twist. Nearly 150 times during his
presidency, he claimed that
“hundreds of billions” of dollars
had come into NATO because of
his complaints. Sometimes, as
president, he even suggested this
money might be coming directly to
the United States.
This is all poppycock.
There are two types of funding
for NATO: direct and indirect.
The amount of direct funding
provided by each NATO member,
for military-related operations,
maintenance and headquarters
activity, generally is based on
gross national income — the total
domestic and foreign output
claimed by residents of a country
— and adjusted regularly. T he
United States and Germany each
underwrite 16.34 percent of
direct spending; the U.S. share
had previously been slightly
higher, as it had the biggest
economy, but its share was
reduced under Trump, at his
insistence.
A significant portion of the U.S.
share goes to operating the
aircraft fleet used in the Airborne
Early Warning and Control
System, or AWACS, according to
the Congressional Research
Service. The United States
contributed about $406 million
in Trump’s last year in office,
although President Biden sought
to boost that to $482 million in
fiscal 2022.
Those numbers are a rounding
error in the Pentagon’s“I hope everyone is
able to remember
that it was me, as
President of the
United States, that
got delinquent
NATO members to
start paying their
dues, which
amounted to
hundreds of
billions of dollars.
There would be no NATO if I
didn’t act strongly and swiftly.
Also, it was me that got Ukraine
the very effective antitank busters
(Javelins) when the previous
Administration was sending
blankets. Let History so note!”
— Former president Donald
Trump, in a statement, Feb. 28,
2022
Only days ago, Trump lauded
Russian President Vladimir Putin
as “very savvy” for making a
“genius” move by declaring two
regions of eastern Ukraine
independent states and
dispatching Russian armed forces
to seize them. “Putin declares it as
independent. Oh, that’s
wonderful,” Trump said Feb. 22
on the “Clay Travis and Buck
Sexton” show, referring to the
troops as “the strongest peace
force I’ve ever seen.”
It turns out that Putin
launched an invasion of all of
Ukraine. With Ukraine fighting
gallantly and the United States
and its allies imposing harsh
sanctions on Russia, Trump
issued a defensive statement last
Monday r epeating falsehoods he
regularly uttered while president.
With Trump, it’s hard to know
whether he’s willfully ignorant or
has simply swallowed his own
Four-Pinocchio spin. Far from
being a savior of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, he
frequently sought to undermine
it. Here’s a line-by-line guide to
what’s wrong or misleading in his
Trump’s risible effort to rewrite history on his support of NATO and Ukraine
The Fact
Checker
GLENN
KESSLER
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Former president Donald Trump takes the stage Feb. 28 at the
Conservative Political Action Conference in O rlando.All programs will be streamed live
at washingtonpostlive.com, on
Facebook Live, YouTube, and
Twitter. Email
[email protected] to submit
questions for our upcoming
speakers.Monday, Mar. 7 | 2 p.m.Race in America: Health DisparitiesHealth and Human Services
Secretary Xavier BecerraSanta Ana Mayor Vicente
SarmientoModerated by Jonathan CapehartPresenting Sponsor: SOMOSTuesday, Mar. 8 | 11 a.m.International Women’s DayMaria Ressa, co-founder, Rappler
and Nobel Peace Prize winnerModerated by Frances Stead SellersWednesday, Mar. 9 | 1 p.m.Race in America: Giving VoiceJohn Cho, actor and author,
“Troublemaker”Moderated by David NakamuraWednesday, Mar. 9 | 3 p.m.The Future of Russia: The OligarchsPavel Khodorkovskiy, president,
Institute of Modern Russia & CTO,
EnertivModerated by Greg MillerThursday, Mar. 10 | 9 a.m.World Stage: UkraineEmily Haber, German ambassador
to the United StatesModerated by David IgnatiusThursday, Mar. 10 | 10:30 a.m.The Path ForwardU.S. Tr easury Secretary Janet L.
Ye llenModerated by Jonathan CapehartThursday, Mar. 10 | noonBear GryllsBear Grylls, outdoor adventurer
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columnist, The Washington PostEugene Robinson, opinions
columnist, The Washington PostModerated by Jonathan CapehartUpcoming Washington
Post Live eventsinterviewers. However, overall,
she gave Biden credit for trying to
bridge the nation’s bitter political
divisions.
“The president’s goal was very
clear on really projecting a theme
of unity, and I think he stuck to
that,” she said.
Although Biden’s popularity
plummeted to the levels of
Trump’s presidency, he always
maintained one key edge over his
predecessor: Most people like
Biden.
In late January, Gallup
recorded Biden’s lowest approval
rating thus far, 40 percent, but
Biden was viewed as “likable” by
60 percent of voters.
A sizable bloc of Americans,
about 20 percent, likes Biden as a
person but does not like his job
performance. That gives him
room to come back from the fall
and winter depths of his
unpopularity.
Just before the 202 0 election,
66 percent of voters liked Biden,
while just 36 percent considered
Trump “ likable.”
And for strategists such as
Ferguson, the best approach is to
focus Biden on the themes from
his 2020 race and five decades of
experience in Washington.
Tuesday served as a good first
step.
“It was Joe. He told a story of
America as a beacon of freedom
in the world and then outlined an
agenda for the middle class who
built that America. People
respond to it,” Ferguson said.theme.
Politically chastened
presidents have used the State of
the Union to reposition their
parties, quite famously in 1995,
when then-President Bill Clinton
declared the “era of big
government is over.”
But that came after Democrats
lost their majorities in the 1994
midterms, and Biden is trying
this course correction eight
months ahead of what is shaping
up as a very difficult election for
Democrats.
To Ferguson and Putnam,
Biden is returning to his roots as
Senate Judiciary Committee
chairman in the 1980s and early
1990 s. He s truggled at times in
the Democratic presidential
primary defending his
authorship of the overly punitive
1994 crime law, but he
understood that the real-world
politics of crime are different
from what they are among liberal
activists on Twitter.
“The solutions are in the
middle, where the country can
find agreement, and that has
been Joe Biden’s playbook his
entire career,” Putnam said.
Those lines didn’t win support
from liberal icons such as Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-
N.Y.), who used an appearance on
MSNBC right after the speech to
offer some criticism.
“I think there’s some themes
that are — left a little bit to be
desired for key constituencies in
the Democratic base,” she told herabandoned them.
“Biden did NOT campaign on
this. He’d been a voice of
moderation & compromise. He
got hijacked,” Mark Putnam, a
consultant who worked for Biden
in previous campaigns, wrote on
Twitter in October.
On Tuesday, inside the House
chamber, Putnam saw the
president settling back into the
issue set that anchored his
campaign and defined his career.
“That Joe Biden in the State of
the Union is the Joe Biden that
America voted for. He was strong
and he was willing to speak the
truth to both the far right and the
far left,” said Putnam, who ran the
ad campaign for the super PAC
that supported Biden’s 2020
candidacy.
He singled out Biden’s
denouncing the “defund the
police” movement as the “most
important” moment.
“We should all agree the
answer is not to defund the
police; it’s to fund the police,”
Biden said Tuesday. He called for
more resources and training to
handle confrontations like the
one in Minneapolis in 2020 that
ended with the police killing of
George Floyd, which energized
the “defund” movement among
liberals. But that movement
never gained broad support
among most voters.
Republicans credited their
surprising gain of more than 10
seats in the House in the 2020
elections to their attacks on thatbiggest concern for voters.
Republicans continue to
demonstrate more enthusiasm
heading into the November
midterm elections. Biden’s
response to Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine could wind up doing
little to thwart Moscow’s
aggression. And the president’s
legislative agenda remains in a
Capitol quagmire amid
Democratic infighting, with no
new focus coming from his
speech Tuesday.
“Biden decided to stay the
course. So, his first State of the
Union was like most, a boring
catalogue of ‘accomplishments’
and a laundry list, in this case, of
progressive proposals for the
future,” David Winston, a veteran
GOP pollster who works closely
with congressional Republicans,
wrote Wednesday in CQ Roll Call.
The last State of the Union
address, delivered by Donald
Trump in February 2020,
devolved into a fiery, divisive rally
that ended with House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripping
apart the pages of his speech.
Instead of that WWE
approach, Biden stuck to his
“laundry list” of proposals, which
proved to be popular when voters
were asked about them
individually.
But voters recoiled when all
those proposals were presented
as one massive piece of
legislation, ranging in cost from
$2 trillion to $3.5 trillion. Many
independents felt that Biden hadOne prominent
liberal felt the
speech “left a little
to be desired” in
its ambition. A
veteran Republican strategist
called it a “missed opportunity to
lead.” And the conservative-
leaning New York Post mocked
President Biden for drawing
fewer viewers than his
predecessors did in similar
speeches.
But, in the days that followed
Biden’s first State of the Union
address, Democrats felt better
about what they heard. Gone was
the talk about being a
“transformational” president in
the mold of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt or Lyndon Baines
Johnson. Gone was the talk about
sweeping legislation changing
almost e very facet of American
life.
That political downsizing
made the speech boring, to some,
but Democrats believe that slow
and steady won the race in 2020,
when millions of voters preferred
Biden’s promises of boring
competence over the chaos of the
previous four years.
“That speech wasn’t a new Joe
Biden. He was saying the same
things you’d e xpect to hear from
him if he was sitting on the couch
in your living room. He was never
about being conservative or
liberal, he was always Joe,” said
Jesse Ferguson, a veteran political
strategist for House Democrats.
A poll commissioned by NPR
and PBS and released Friday
found a historically high bump in
Biden’s approval rating, up to 47
percent, from 39 percent just a
week earlier. Independent voters
jumped up 10 percentage points
in their approval of Biden. And
one independent analyst noted
the surge of support in the
president’s own party.
“Biden at 90% approval rating
among Democrats. That’s better
than the mid-70s he’s been
getting,” Nathan G onzales, the
editor of Inside Elections, wrote
Friday.
Voters are rewarding Biden for
rallying the world against
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On
his handling of this crisis, his
approval among Democratic and
independent voters soared by 27
and 17 points, respectively, from a
week earlier.
This crisis helped shore up
Biden’s previously battered image
as a global leader after the deadly
withdrawal from Afghanistan last
summer.
That poll landed a few hours
after another blockbuster jobs
report came from the L abor
Department showing that the
economy added more than
678, 000 jobs in February.
All this could add up to a
temporary sugar high for Biden
and Democrats, as a new inflation
report will arrive next week and
surging costs for e veryday goods
continue to be, far and away, the
Biden allies applaud address as boring, a nd that is a good thing
@PKCapitol
PAUL KANE
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Biden exits the chamber of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night after delivering his first State of the Union address.
Biden is attempting a course correction toward the center eight months ahead of what is shaping up as a difficult election for Democrats.