“I got rid of NATO”: Donald Trump confuses NATO and NAFTA during Fox News interview

Former President Donald Trump on Fox News bragged that he withdrew from NATO, confusing the security alliance with the NAFTA trade agreement. 

In an interview on Tuesday with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump boasted that other countries learned “not to mess around” with him when it came to trade.

“Did they fear me? I suspect they did,” he said, citing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pushback on the Nord Stream pipeline.

“Putin said, ‘Man, you are killing me, especially about Nord Stream.’ And I stopped it. It was stopped cold,” the former president said. 

“And I told other countries, ‘If you go into the Nord Stream, you are not going to do any business with the United States of America,’ meaning rip us off on trade because a lot of them have ripped us off,” he said. 

“I changed a lot of those deals where it was a bad deal for us and now it’s good, like USMCA with NATO,” he added. 

The former president tried to reference the North American Free Trade Agreement but instead highlighted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a security coalition made up of 28 European states, plus the US and Canada, formed to counter Russian aggression.

“I got rid of NATO and built USMCA,” he repeated. “I made a great trade deal with China. Our farmers, to this day they made tremendous money because of the deal.” 

Hannity did not correct him throughout the entire exchange. 

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Trump did withdraw the US from NAFTA in 2017 as a part of his promise to withdraw US trade policy. He then brokered the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020 as a replacement. 

While Trump has been outspoken against NATO — threatening to pull out of the treaty and accusing other members of not spending enough on defense — the U.S. is still a member. Trump has also praised Putin as he invaded Ukraine and threatened NATO members. 

Trump and Hannity later discussed President Joe Biden and what they described as his “cognitive struggling.” The Fox host asked Trump if he would take a cognitive test again.

“I would like to see it for anybody running for president, taking a cognitive test,” Trump said. “You know they do it in China, but it’s done in a different way. They have a caste system. And the smartest person gets to the top,” he claimed.

The last cognitive test Trump took, one he said was very difficult, was when he famously repeated the words: “Person, woman, man, camera, TV.”