Take a walk, Don!
Protest ahead of NATO summit
Europe is bracing for Hurricane Trump.
The president and First Lady Melania Trump set off Tuesday for a whirlwind weeklong trip, starting with the NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, storming into England and Scotland for a long weekend, then touching down for a long-anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
At the NATO confab, nervous allies anticipate another round of arguments over defense spending and tariffs, one month after the contentious G-7 meeting in Canada that most of the same leaders attended.
NATO members fear a repeat of his Jekyll-and-Hyde act in Quebec, where he insulted other heads of state and refused to sign a joint communique with them.
Days ago, the president sent letters to the leaders of Belgium, Germany, Norway and other NATO members demanding they live up to their promises to spend 2 percent of their GDPs on national defense.
“Continued German underspending on defense undermines the security of the alliance,” Trump scolded Chancellor Angela Merkel, CNN reported.
It was far from Trump’s first demand that NATO allies put more skin in the defense-spending game. But coming on the heels of the administration’s tough trade talk and sharp tariff increases, it rankled.
“We now have a major crisis,” a senior European official told CNN.
Trump will leave the NATO meeting Thursday for London, where protest organizers say up to 100,000 demonstrators — and a 19foot blimp in the image of a cellphone-toting “Trump Baby” — will be there to greet him.
Not that they’ll see much of the president, whose itinerary sticks to secure venues for his entire two-day stay. The president is expected to spend the weekend in Scotland to prepare for his Monday meeting with Putin.