Trump falsely claims, yet again, he saved NATO Only days ago, Trump lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin as "very savvy" for making a "genius" move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and dispatching Russian armed forces to seize them. "Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful," Trump said Feb. 22 on the "Clay Travis and Buck Sexton" show, referring to the troops as "the strongest peace force I've ever seen." Of course, it turns out that Putin launched an invasion of all of Ukraine. With Ukraine putting up a gallant fight and the United States and its allies imposing harsh sanctions on Russia, Trump on Monday issued a defensive statement repeating falsehoods he regularly made during his presidency. With Trump, it's hard to know if he's willfully ignorant or if he has simply swallowed his own spin. Far from being a savior of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he frequently sought to undermine it. So we created a guide to what's wrong or misleading in his statement. One of the most jaw-dropping claims was that Trump said "there would be no NATO if I didn't act strongly and swiftly." In reality, Trump repeatedly told aides he wanted to leave NATO. When Trump ran for reelection, it was generally feared he would pull out of the alliance if he was reelected. In a fit of pique at Germany, Trump in 2020 ordered the withdrawal of 12,000 U.S. troops, about one-third of the force based there. When Biden became president, he quickly reversed the plan and kept the troops there. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. No, the U.S. military did not spend '6 million hours' on a 'woke' agenda During an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Feb. 27, Donald Trump Jr. asserted: "Our generals, the great woke leaders of our military that spent 6 million man-hours training our troops about wokeness — not fighting, not killing bad guys." A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment, but we quickly traced the source of the 6 million figure. Somewhat unique to Trumpworld, it was not a number invented out of whole cloth. But it's a number lacking significant context. The number comes from an estimate by Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the time devoted to an extremism "stand-down" related to the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol — nearly 5.4 million hours. Since nearly 2.5 million members of the military participated, that means about two hours per person, which Milley noted is "comparable to other Joint Force periodic training requirements." To put this big number in perspective, if every service member did just four hours of physical training a week — and the figure probably is higher — that would mean 10 million hours a week and more than 500 million hours a year. So 6 million hours for a discussion on extremism in the ranks is just a drop in the bucket. Trump earned Three Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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