President Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland was filled with inaccurate claims – notably including false and misleading statements about NATO and Greenland, the self-governing Danish territory he is pushing for the US to acquire.
Trump also repeated numerous long-debunked false claims about foreign affairs, the economy and other issues. Here is a fact check of some of his remarks.
US benefits from NATO: Trump claimed: “So what we have gotten out of NATO is nothing, except to protect Europe from the Soviet Union and now Russia. I mean, we’ve helped them for so many years. We’ve never gotten anything.”
This is simply not true – even leaving aside arguments that the US has reaped important military, economic and political benefits from the existence of the alliance. NATO came to the defense of the US after the al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The alliance invoked Article 5, its collective defense provision, for the only time in its history, and member countries formed a coalition to fight a war in Afghanistan alongside US forces. Member countries fought there for years, and many of them suffered casualties. Denmark, for example, lost more than 40 soldiers, one of the alliance’s highest per-capita death rates.
NATO members’ defense spending: Trump also claimed that, “until I came along,” the US “was paying for virtually 100% of NATO,” adding, “We paid for, in my opinion, 100% of NATO.” Trump’s “opinion” is...
Image: MANDEL NGAN / AFP US President Donald Trump once again amplified his false claim of a “white genocide” against Afrikaners in South Africa after addressing the World Economic Forum (WEF) in ...