On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher and Eurasia Group and GZERO Media Founder Ian Bremmer stated that President Donald Trump should get some credit for getting Europe to increase its defense spending.
Maher stated, “Another thing that worked out, actually, I don’t think it was necessarily the way he intended, but he certainly gets some credit for it, he wanted European countries to pay more, and to take — Clinton once made a speech and said America was the indispensable nation, and Trump was like, yeah, we don’t want to be. Why do we have to be indispensable? Okay, I kind of liked it when we were indispensable, and I would like to think there are things about us that are indispensable, but there is truth to that, too. He was right, the European countries could step up and they did step up. Germany is spending more money, I think, now on their defense than they have in, like, 40 years, in one year.”
Bremmer then said, “I give Putin a little more credit for that than Trump, but Trump deserves some credit for that.”
Maher responded, “Right. Because Putin threatened, and he said, well, this is a European problem. It’s not like we haven’t already given a hell of a lot of money to Ukraine. And then we kind of stopped, which was wrong.” Bremmer also criticized American support for Ukraine as too low.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett