Last month, Sean Hannity invited Donald Trump on his show in the hopes of doing some damage control. You see, the ex-president had spent the previous weeks describing Vladimir Putin in absolutely glowing terms, and given the Russian leader’s decision to wage an unprovoked, unjustified war in Ukraine, the dictatorial ass-kissing didn’t look great. Unfortunately for Hannity, despite numerous attempts to get Trump to denounce Putin or admit that what he was doing was evil, the former guy refused to bite, which probably had something to do with his documented affection for human rights abusers.
In the month since, Putin’s actions have only gotten more despicable. According to Ukraine, Russian soldiers have been “systematically” raping women and girls. The Kyiv suburb of Bucha has been described as “a landscape of horrors,” with body bags strewn on the streets. According to the United Nations, more than 10 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Meanwhile, Russia has upped its campaign of disinformation and propaganda, falsely accusing Ukraine of using mannequins to stage casualties and, incredibly, claiming that the torture, rape, and murder of civilians was not done by their soldiers but by British operatives.
Given all this, Hannity apparently was under the impression that Trump would’ve had a change of heart about the Russian president, because what normal person wouldn’t? So during an interview on Wednesday, the Fox News host posed a question he no doubt thought he knew the answer to. “I asked you the last time you were on, whether you think that this is evil in our time,” Hannity said. “Do you believe this is evil in our time?”
Obviously, in a scenario in which Trump wasn’t a dictator-loving sociopath, he would’ve answered, “Sean, this man is the very definition of evil and I take back every nice thing I ever said about him.” Of course, in reality, Trump is a dictator-loving sociopath, so instead, he refused to answer the softball question his good pal Hannity was attempting to spoon-feed him, and went on a rant about NATO.
“I think in a hundred years, people are gonna look back and they’re going to say, ‘How did we stand back, and NATO stand back?’—which, in many ways, I’ve called a paper tiger. Don’t forget, I rebuilt NATO. Because when I became president the first thing I noticed when I went there for the first meeting was that most of the countries were not paying, or were paying far less than they were supposed to. There were only eight out of 28 countries that were paying in full. The United States was not only one of them, we were making up the deficit in order to protect Europe. We were paying possibly 80% of NATO to protect them and then they take advantage of us yet [again] on trade because on trade they’re every bit as bad as China. They treated us very badly on trade. We changed a lot of that around, but they were very tough on trade. I asked Angela Merkel, ‘How many Chevrolets are you selling this month in Munich or Berlin?’ And she looked at me and [said,] ‘Well, probably none.’ And I said, ‘You’re exactly right. None.’ And yet we had the Mercedes-Benz and the Volkswagen and all of them; we had all of the German companies.”
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As New York’s Jonathan Chait notes, no serious person actually believes Trump “rebuilt” NATO, despite his supporters’ attempts to argue that by constantly bashing the alliance, he got its members to step up their funding. Rather, it’s clear that his claims that other countries were deadbeats who didn’t pay their bill was, as Chait writes, “a pretext for the United States to abandon the alliance altogether,” that Trump would have done so in a second term, and that the loss of this “outcome is the best explanation of why Putin decided to invade Ukraine now.”
And speaking of Putin, elsewhere in the interview, the former president apparently couldn’t help himself from boasting, yet again, about how tight he was with the man currently responsible for the slaughter of innocent people. “I knew Putin very well. Almost as well as I know you, Sean,” Trump said, as images of body bags were flashed across the screen. “I will tell you, we talked about it, we talked about it a lot, he did want Ukraine, but I said, ‘You’re not going into Ukraine.’ He would never, ever have gone into Ukraine [on my watch].”
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