I am accidentally more coherent than POTUS is with assistance. What was the purpose of these speeches? Even I can comprehend that the purpose of international travel for a head of state is to promote mutual cooperation, not to market. The United States of America is a country, not a corporation. The existence of a nation state actually requires some statesmanship. If you want to claim the title of world leader you must speak to the world, not just your clique. Excerpts from the speeches are in black text, comments are in red.
Remarks by President Trump
at the Three Seas Initiative Summit | July 6, 2017
Royal Castle
Warsaw, Poland
The
Three Seas Initiative is a joint Polish-Croatian project, launched in 2016,
with the aim of strengthening trade, infrastructure, energy and political
co-operation among countries bordering the Adriatic, the Baltic and the Black
Sea.
-
The following 12 countries are part of the initiative:
Poland,
Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia,
Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.
-
Most of the 12 countries were in the Soviet sphere of influence after World War
Two until 1989 and more than half of those joined the European Union in 2004.
Nearly all are heavily reliant on Russian gas and oil imports.
New energy infrastructure is essential to this rebuilding
effort. We hope that the Three Seas nations will advance the same goals
we are working on to achieve for our people in America. We’re doing
tremendously well. Our stock market just hit an all-time high. As it continues
just like the past 9 years. We have, I
think, 16 years -- in 16 years it’s the lowest unemployment rate. Our
military is getting stronger and stronger. We’re rebuilding it, adding
billions and billions of dollars of new equipment. The best equipment in
the world. We make the best equipment in the world by far. We’re
adding many billions of dollars of brand-new equipment.
“This
is why some people don’t want peace: they make more money from war, although
wars make money but lose lives, health, education. The devil enters through our
wallets.” Pope Francis
And the United States is
doing very well -- very strong. We’ve taken off restrictions and people
are really moving hard. So when I say that the stock market is at an
all-time high, we’ve picked up in market value almost $4 trillion since November
8th, which was the election. $4 trillion -- it's a lot of money.
Personally, I picked up nothing, but that’s all right. This might be true had you divested yourself of
commercial property using a blind trust.
That is not the case. Everyone
else is getting rich. That's awesome,
therefore everyone will have access to and be able to afford adequate health
care. That’s okay. I’m very happy.
I congratulate your nations
for already beginning the critical projects that open us up to greater access,
and you’ll be totally open and have access to energy markets and remove
barriers to energy trade, such as floating LNG terminal on the Croatian island
of Krk. Did you ever hear of that? Right? Huh? You know
all about that. I bet you know all
about it. You are addressing a conference of industrialists. Why do you speak to people as if they are 8th
graders? And the Greece-Bulgaria
Interconnector.
These projects and many others are crucial to ensuring
that your nations continue to diversify your energy sources, suppliers, and
routes. I also applaud Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Austria for
pursuing a pipeline from the Black Sea. We just approved a big pipeline
also -- the Keystone Pipeline. It was under consideration for many, many
years, and it was dead and I approved it in my first day of office. Actually, it was approved in March 2017, but let's
not muddy the waters with facts. And it’s now under construction. And
another pipeline besides that -- big ones -- Dakota Access.
America will be a faithful and dependable partner in the
export and sale of our high-quality and low-cost energy resources and
technologies. We make the best technology and we make the best, best
technology for fighter jets and ships and equipment, military weapons.
There’s nobody even close, and that’s acknowledged. There is
no disputing this and it's a good thing.
Not only do we offer the best war making machines in the world but we
have the largest economy. We spend more
on our military than the next 10 largest spending countries combined. This may explain why the U.S. ranks anywhere
from 7th-25th in education and 27th-37th in health care, world wide, depending
on the rating system you prefer. All over
the world they talk about the greatness of our military equipment. Nobody
comes close. So when you buy and as you buy military equipment, hopefully
you’ll be thinking only of the United States.
This summit ushers in the next great energy frontier.
This is largely about energy because we are that great exporter.
We’ve just become -- what’s going on in our country is incredible, and I
hope you take advantage of it by using these resources. Oh, right, this
was a conference about energy infrastructure.
I was distracted by the references to U.S. capital creation and war
making capabilities.
July
06, 2017
Remarks by President Trump
to the People of Poland | July 6, 2017
Krasiński Square
Warsaw, Poland
We've come to your nation to deliver a very important message:
America loves Poland, and America loves the Polish people.
(Applause.) Thank you.
We are also pleased that former President Leck Walesa, so famous
for leading the Solidarity Movement, has joined us today, also. Well done, recognizing a trade union organizer and human rights activist.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank
you so much. Such a great honor. This is a nation more than one
thousand years old. Your borders were erased for more than a century and
only restored just one century ago.
In 1920, in the Miracle of Vistula, Poland stopped the
Soviet army bent on European conquest. (Applause.) Then, 19 years
later in 1939, you were invaded yet again, this time by Nazi Germany from the
west and the Soviet Union from the east. That’s trouble. That’s
tough. Poignant.
Under a double occupation the Polish people endured evils
beyond description: the Katyn forest massacre, the occupations, the Holocaust,
the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the destruction of this
beautiful capital city, and the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people.
A vibrant Jewish population -- the largest in Europe -- was reduced to
almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s
Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation. No doubt
the Poles attending need this history lesson.
But just as our adversaries and enemies of the past learned here
in Poland, we know that these forces, too, are doomed to fail if we want them
to fail.
Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will
never forget who we are. And if we don’t forget who are, we just can't be
beaten. Americans will never forget. The nations of Europe will
never forget. We are the fastest and the greatest community. There
is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known
anything like our community of nations. Of whom is this community comprised? Are
you proposing the countries which do not constitute the "western"
world will be beaten and fail? Does the
possession of different customs and values make one an enemy or adversary
merely by existing? See @realDonaldTrump
tweet at bottom.
We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success.
He insulted
Brande Roderick, a contestant on The Apprentice.
"It must be a pretty picture," he said to her. "You dropping to
your knees."
he has called "Miss Piggy,"
"Miss Housekeeping," and an "eating machine."
"I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me
(don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho
Joe, came ... to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and
insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said
no!"
- “You know, it doesn’t really
matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful
piece of ass.”
- And when you're a star they
let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do
anything."
We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the
center of our lives. No doubt that is why POTUS has been married 3 times. And we debate everything. We challenge
everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know
ourselves.
And above all, we value the dignity of every human life,
protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in
freedom. As
exemplified by insuring every citizen has access to quality health care.
Americans know that a strong alliance of free, sovereign
and independent nations is the best defense for our freedoms and for our
interests. That is why my administration has demanded that all members of
NATO finally meet their full and fair financial obligation.
As a result of this insistence, billions of dollars more
have begun to pour into NATO. In fact, people are shocked. But
billions and billions of dollars more are coming in from countries that, in my
opinion, would not have been paying so quickly. POTUS has made this claim repeatedly with a
lack of regard for the facts.
NATO was established
in the aftermath of World War II, originally with 12 members and the intention
of binding together Western Europe in a defense alliance with the United States
and Canada to counter the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Eastern
Europe (known as the Warsaw Pact). After the Soviet Union collapsed and the
Warsaw Pact unraveled, NATO expanded to include many Eastern European nations
and even former parts of the Soviet Union. There are now 28 member countries in
NATO.
There are two types of funding for
NATO: direct
funding and indirect funding. Direct funding, for military-related
operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national
income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a
country — and adjusted regularly. With the largest economy in NATO, the United
States pays the largest share — about 22 percent. Germany is second, with about
15 percent. A significant portion of the U.S. share is operating the Airborne
Early Warning and Control System (AWACS) fleet operations, according to the Congressional
Research Service.
The U.S. share of the actual
military budget is negotiated each year, but largely based on the cost-sharing
formula, and amounts to less than $500 million a year, according to Defense
Department documents.
That’s a rounding error in a $600
billion defense budget.
But Trump is really talking about
indirect funding. Since 2006, each NATO member has had a guideline of spending
at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense spending. At a 2014
summit, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, NATO members pledged to
meet that guideline by 2024.
At the moment, only five of the 28
members exceed the guideline — with the United States leading the way at 3.6
percent. The other members that exceed the guideline are Greece, Estonia,
Britain and Poland, but the perceived threat from Russia has prompted
other nations to bolster their defense spending. In 2016, median spending by
NATO members on defense was 1.21 percent of GDP, but it’s still eight years
away from the deadline. The guideline is not legally binding.
Moreover, as defense experts Richard
Sokolsy and Gordon Adams have noted, the 2 percent guideline is rather
arbitrary. Greece met it, even though it has slashed defense spending, because
its economy collapsed. “Measuring what the allies spend on defense as a share
of their economies tells us nothing about the capabilities they are buying,”
they wrote
for the War on the Rocks website.
Yet Trump continues to misleadingly
frame the failure to meet the guideline as money owed to the United States:
“This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States. And many of
these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in
those past years,” he said at NATO, as cameras recorded puzzled
or skeptical expressions on the faces of other leaders.
But this is simply money that each
country would spend on its own military — or on missions that do not include
NATO, such as peacekeeping in Africa. Trump noted that if all NATO members met
the 2 percent guideline, then another $119 billion would be spent on defense.
But this would still leave the rest of NATO far behind the United States alone
— $608 billion for the United States, $400 billion for the other 27 members.
(Trump, in fact, proposes to boost U.S. military spending even more.)
“We have to remember that fair
burden-sharing was something we addressed at our summit in 2014,” NATO
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters
after Trump’s speech. “And several NATO allies also expressed that we have to
invest in defense not just to please the United States but we have to invest in
European defense because it is in our own interest to do so.”
While Stoltenberg said Trump has
been “very clear, blunt and plain” at the NATO meetings, he reminded reporters
that NATO had already taken action before Trump arrived on the scene: “After
years of decline in defense spending across Europe and Canada we turned the
corner in 2015, we stopped the cuts, and in 2016 we had significant
increase.”
Why does the United States spend so
much more on its defense? The United States is a world power with global
responsibilities, including in Asia. Iceland, which spends the smallest percent
of its GDP on defense, does not even have a standing army, though it has a
coast guard.
Experts say it’s impossible to
figure out how much of U.S. military spending is devoted just to NATO but for
decades, U.S. presidents have concluded that the U.S. commitment to the defense
of NATO members was an essential part of overall U.S. security. U.S. bases in
Germany, for instance, are frequently an important part of American operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq. (The United States spends
about $7 billion a year on bases in Germany, South Korea and Japan, about
half of which is paid back.)
That is why we applaud Poland for its decision to move forward
this week on acquiring from the United States the battle-tested Patriot air and
missile defense system -- the best anywhere in the world. (Applause.)
That is also why we salute the Polish people for being one of the NATO
countries that has actually achieved the benchmark for investment in our common
defense. Good job on making the sale. However, Russia invading Poland is a far cry from Iraq firing missiles at Israel where the Patriot air and missile defense system was used in combat. Even then, and you can look this up, the results were less than stellar.
THE WEST WILL NEVER BE BROKEN.
Our values will PREVAIL. Our people will THRIVE and our civilization will
TRIUMPH!
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