I’m just cringing in embarrassment at the thought that the President of the United States actually printed up a bullshit invoice for Germany’s shortfall below 2% of GDP on defense, plus interest. And handed it to Merkel.
Does ‘diplomacy’ have an antonym? Sheesh. This is beyond merely tacky and juvenile. It’s those things, too, but the context propels them well past that.
Seriously, doesn’t this make Republicans cringe in embarrassment? (And I’m thinking about Congresscritters and the like, not just Republican voters.) Because it should. And as one tweet I saw said, “The conservatives who said Obama turned the US into a laughingstock on the international stage owe him an apology.” Bigly.
Trump has done a lot of things that make me wince, but on some level I can understand the motivation and goal. This is just fuckin’ junior high level, like a spurned date sending a bill for the prom dress and hairdo. What a classless, white trash piece of shit.
Sad fuckin’ day when I believe the Germans implicitly and snort at the denial. Who here really thinks the Merkel administration would make up such a stupid, juvenile claim? Who here disbelieves that Trumpy would do exactly this jerkwad “negotiating tactic”?
“Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” -the big Cheeto, 18 March
That noted, the reportage seems to be virtually the same in all accounts on-line and some more confirmation would be welcome. And that noted, it strikes me as just the type of thing President trump would consider ‘diplomatic’. Good. God.
The article from The Independent uses passive voice an awful lot and otherwise mentions the article from The Sunday Times, so there still seems to be only one source for the story.
Isn’t it kind of weird the source is a British paper? I’d think if German gov’t officals wanted to leak a story about their relationship with the US, they’d go to a German paper, or barring that, a US one.
I’m a little skeptical, too. All the stories are the same source; all rely on an unnamed source. None are confirmed by Merkel or any actual official of either government. There’s no image of the “invoice.”
Perhaps most pertinently, it’s out of character for Trump to actually hinge anything he does on an actual number.
It’s unclear to me that the second source is independent of the first, since it references the first. It also contradicts that a specific amount was given (or known to be given).
I’m not saying it’s out of the realm of possibilities, and it could be that Trump’s denial is related to the exact amount being reported. But I’d like to see more than one source. That’s all.
If you were the Russians, and you wanted to totally buttfuck America as a world power and a society, you’d want a stooge who is coincidentally doing exactly what Trump is doing.