Former President Donald Trump released a lengthy statement full of false claims about NATO while praising himself for bolstering the alliance. The statement came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was wrapping up an emotional address to Congress in which he called on the US government to take stronger action to counter Russia's devastating war in Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly gotten basic facts of NATO wrong or been willfully lying about the alliance he's said was "obsolete" only to later correct himself because he did not know "much about NATO." Most of Trump's new statement repeated previous false claims he's made about the NATO alliance, including that several member countries were "delinquent" and that he was the one who got them to "pay up" in exchange for the US's protection.

"Nobody knew things would happen so rapidly, but NATO was poor and now it is rich, and all of the Fake News commentators that said Trump was tearing down NATO should be ashamed of themselves for telling lies," Trump's statement said.

He went on to say that unlike previous US presidents, "I acted, and acted strongly. I said to them, 'if you don't pay up, no protection.' "

Contrary to Trump's claims, European members of NATO and Canada had increased their defense spending in 2015 and 2016, before Trump took office. Also, NATO countries don't pay up. They have pledged to spend a certain amount of their gross domestic product on their own militaries, and pay a small stipend to fund NATO headquarters.

And in 2014, two years before Trump came into office, all NATO members reached an agreement to spend at least two percent of their annual GDP on their own defense by 2024.

Trump's assertion that members of the alliance were "delinquent" in their contributions also doesn't add up, because countries decided on their own how much of their GDP to spend on their own defense. In other words, as fact checkers have pointed out, they don't "owe" NATO or the US money.

"There is no ledger that maintains accounts of what countries pay and owe," former Obama administration National Security Council staffer Aaron O'Connell told NPR. "NATO is not like a club with annual membership fees."

Courtesy Business Insider

Calling Don a lying fool, dishonors liars and idiots.