CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed in a speech Thursday evening as she accepted the Democrat presidential nomination that her opponent, former President Donald Trump, encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade U.S. allies and that he said Russia could “do whatever the hell they want.”
VERDICT: False. Trump never told Putin or any Russian official this.
As Breitbart News reported, Trump was speaking at a campaign event in South Carolina on February 10 and recalled a conversation he had with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she asked him a hypothetical question, and he gave her a hypothetical answer.
According to Trump, Merkel — then the leader of the country with the largest economy in Europe — asked him if the U.S. would still defend Germany if it was invaded by Russia but they did not meet their obligation as a NATO member to spend at least two percent of its GDP on defense.
Trump said he told her, “No, I would not protect you…In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
Despite the conversation being hypothetical and in line with Trump’s pressure on NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations while he was president, President Joe Biden, Democrats, and the media have repeatedly misrepresented his remarks.
Ironically, the last three times that Putin invaded any country were during the Biden, Obama, and George W. Bush administrations, not during Trump’s administration.
Harris also claimed that she helped mobilize a global response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, she and Biden appeared to do very little — if anything — as Russian troops began gathering at the border of Ukraine months in advance.
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