The set of “Morning Joe” spent a second day deriding President Trump’s performance at the NATO summit, with co-host Mika Brzezinski warning that Trump’s domestic blunders should make Americans afraid of his performance abroad.
“Quite frankly the incompetence that this president has shown in terms of his separation policy, we should be frightened about the damage he is doing on the world stage,” said Brzezinski.
“It’s very similar to the border separation issue. He creates a problem, he creates a policy and creates a fight over it and has absolutely no plan moving forward,” she added. “And we’ve got hundreds possibly thousands of children hanging in the balance, some who will be orphaned because of this policy and he’s now trying to take credit for fixing it.”
In a press conference on Thursday morning, President Trump said he had again raised issues of NATO members contributing more of their GDP to the mutual defense pact and said he had extracted a commitment from member nations to increase their payments. He also reaffirmed his commitment to NATO.
Earlier this week, Trump opened the summit by lambasting NATO leaders at a breakfast for not meeting their financial commitments and signaled out Germany for a pipeline deal with Russia, which he said would allow the country to be “controlled” by Putin.
“I’ve experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, and I’m very happy today that we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany and can thus say that we can determine our own policies and make our own decisions and that’s very good,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel shot back on Thursday, bushing off Trump’s barb.