'It’s dangerous': Trump’s former EU ambassador calls out ex-president’s NATO 'schtick'

Former President Donald Trump has drawn a great deal of criticism from Democrats, including President Joe Biden, as well as from Never Trump conservatives like MSNBC's Joe Scarborough for saying that if he returns to the White House, he will encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade any NATO countries that don't "pay" enough into the alliance.

This criticism comes at a time when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is also being slammed by Democrats for interviewing Putin in Moscow and being unapologetically favorable to him.

Gordon Sondland served as U.S. ambassador to the European Union (EU) under Trump from 2018-2020, but he didn't share Putin and Carlson's admiration for Putin during a Thursday, February 15 appearance on MSNBC. In fact, he described Putin as a "butcher."

READ MORE:'Leadership requires killing people': Tucker Carlson’s defense of Putin interview stuns critics

When MSNBC's Ari Melber asked Sondland to weigh in on Trump's Putin/NATO comments, he responded, "While I would like to excuse it as, you know, hyperbole, it's part of the Trump schtick. It's dangerous. It would be like you fail to pay your property taxes, and the fire department isn't going to come out and put a fire out at your house. I mean, that never happens. They have other ways of collecting the property taxes, but the fire still gets put out."

Melber asked Sondland if he saw "this sort of attitude" by Trump when he was serving as U.S. ambassador to the EU, and he responded, "That's the funny thing, Ari: I really didn't see it."

Sondland told Melber, "You know, he keeps referring to dues and people paying, and I know a lot of people have used the analogy of a country club. People don't pay dues into NATO. What they do is they try to get to 2 percent of their GDP at a minimum — we're well above that — for their defense spending…. His comment really surprised me because he knows what the ramifications of a remark like that are."

When Melber brought up Carlson's interview with Putin in Moscow, the former ambassador argued, "It should be a unifying thing for the left and the right to sit here and listen to this butcher wax eloquently about what happened that created Ukraine — which is complete bu*****t."

READ MORE: Watch: Joe Scarborough rips Trump for 'encouraging' Putin to 'take over NATO countries'

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