“Nobody has been tougher on Russia than I have,” President Trump said Tuesday, but he added that good relations with Vladimir Putin’s country would be “a good thing.”
NATO “brought in many billions of dollars more than they would have if you had Crooked Hillary as president, OK? . . . We’ve been very tough on Russia, frankly,” the president said during a meeting in Washington with the presidents of the Baltic Sea states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which border on Russia.
Trump then said that developing a stable and friendly relationship with Russia — which the US intelligence community has concluded had meddled in the 2016 election — would be good for the US, and that only “very stupid” people would disagree.
“If we got along with Russia, that would be a good thing, not a bad thing . . . that would be great. Just about everybody agrees with that, except very stupid people,” he said.
Later, at a news conference with presidents Raimonds Vējonis of Latvia, Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania and Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia, Trump said the Baltic nations “can trust the United States will remain a strong, proud and loyal friend and ally.”
The Baltic leaders cited their commitment to NATO, with Grybauskaite saying the Article 5 collective defense under NATO is “iron-clad for all of us.”
With Post wires