CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed during the debate with former President Donald Trump that Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin he could “do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine.”
VERDICT: False. Trump never told Putin he could do “whatever the hell he wants,” and he never told Putin he could go into Ukraine.
The false claim is an oft-repeated lie from Democrats that stems from a story Trump told at a campaign rally in February in South Carolina.
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 asked him if the U.S. would still defend Germany if it was invaded by Russia, but they did not meet their NATO obligation.
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.
For example, Biden repeated the false claim in his State of the Union address in March. And Harris recently repeated the false claim at the Democratic National Convention in August.
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