Trump says US allies worse than its enemies in rambling coronavirus briefing

‘When we are helping friends, friends should reimburse us for the cost,’ US president says, again bashing America’s allies

One minute, Donald Trump is declaring he will help America’s allies fight coronavirus. The next, he’s back to slamming them for having “taken us much more so than the enemies.”

The president’s latest besmirching of US allies — he’s been making such claims since launching his presidential campaign in 2015 — came during one of many rambling diatribes during his nightly Covid-19 briefing on Monday.

Mr Trump was asked a relatively straightforward question about whether he would sign off on “unlimited aid” to states or if he would only sign future coronavirus bills if they stated federal monies would only go for things deemed “pandemic specific”.

“We’re going to be talking about that in phase four [legislation], as you know, which will start very shortly,” he said of talks with legislators from both parties that could start as soon as this week. “And that has to do with infrastructure, hopefully infrastructure, because this country needs infrastructure.”

Almost as if that one word — ”infrastructure” — was a verbal cue, the president went into campaign rally mode.

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“We spend all this money in the Middle East, $1trn, $8trn, trillion with a T, dollars in the Middle East,” the commander in chief said, throwing around a wide range of expenditures. “But if you have a pothole in a highway someplace, they don’t want you to spend the money [at home] to fix it. How stupid have we been in this country? How stupid have we been?”

That part of his out-of-the-blue rant is straight out of his usual campaign rally spiel. The coronavirus briefing-turned-rally continued.

“And that’s changing rapidly. You know that. You’ve seen that, including things like negotiating with friends,” he said.

“When we are helping friends, friends should reimburse us for the cost. I mean, why should we be defending nations for free? We’re defending a nation for free,” the president said, seemingly careful to avoid naming any.

“As far as, as far as the other is concerned, look, we have to be smart in this country. We’ve been taken to the cleaner by every, and I mean with allies, not just with the enemies. With allies. We’ve been, frankly, the allies have taken us much more so than the enemies,” Mr Trump said.

Then it was time for a global political and economic lesson from Professor Trump.

“The enemies we don’t do business with, right? The allies we do business with,” he said. “And whoever made these deals, whoever made these contracts, in many cases, we didn’t have a contract, like we didn’t have a contract, we didn’t have a trade deal with China,” he said before again lauding an incremental trade pact with the Asian giant that he wants to be followed by a larger, more comprehensive one.

Republican and Democratic officials alike want him to be more forceful with Beijing over the government there and its alleged covering up of the Covid-19 going public there. He has sought to be lightly critical, while also treading lightly enough to leave that second trade pact a possibility.

“This is not a good thing that happened,” Mr Trump told reporters Sunday evening. “It came out of China, so we’re not, we’re not in a position where we’re going to say much yet.