Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley called former President Donald Trump’s recent NATO comments “bone-chilling” and empowering to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“When you hear Donald Trump say in South Carolina a week ago that he would encourage Putin to invade our allies if they weren’t pulling their weight, that’s bone-chilling because all he did in that one moment was empower Putin,” Haley said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Trump said on February 10 that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense in a stunning admission he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.
“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, Haley’s home state. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
Haley’s comments followed the death of Russian opposition leader and outspoken Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny while in prison on Friday.
The cause of his reported death remained unclear, but the news drew a forceful reaction from Western leaders, including President Joe Biden, who pinned the blame on Putin, saying that “what has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality.”
Trump has declined to address Navalny’s death directly. When asked by CNN on Friday whether he had a response to Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed to a post on Truth Social from the former president that did not mention Navalny or Putin and instead bashed Biden and asserted “America is no longer respected.”
Haley on Sunday continued to pile on the criticism of Trump and his supposed support for Putin.
“He sided with a guy that kills his political opponents. He sided with a thug that arrests American journalists and holds them hostage, and he sided with a guy who wanted to make a point to the Russian people, ‘Don’t challenge me in the next election or this will happen to you too,’” Haley said.
The former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor on Saturday highlighted Trump’s recent legal woes, claiming the reason he may have not spoken about Navalny’s death is because “he’s distracted.”
“He may not be saying anything because he’s distracted because of his court cases. That’s a very big possibility. There’s a lot of them. We know he said he’s going to be spending more time in the courtroom than he’s going to be spending on the campaign trail,” Haley said at a campaign stop in Irmo, South Carolina, a week ahead of the state’s GOP primary.
Her comments came a day after Trump was fined $355 million in his New York civil fraud trial. The former president was also recently ordered in a defamation case to pay $83 million to E. Jean Carroll, and he faces four criminal indictments.
CNN’s Ebony Davis and Michelle Shen contributed to this story.
