Claim: During a debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin that he was “free to invade Ukraine and do whatever he wants.”
Verdict: False. Trump never told Putin he could “do whatever he wanted” and he never told him he could enter Ukraine.
The false claim is an oft-repeated lie by Democrats and originated from something Trump told at a campaign rally in South Carolina in February.
Breitbart News reported that Trump, speaking at a campaign event in South Carolina on February 10, recalled a conversation he had with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she asked him a fictitious question and he gave a fictitious answer.
Trump said Merkel asked if the US would still defend Germany if it was invaded by Russia, but that the US was not fulfilling its NATO obligations.
Trump reportedly told her: “No, I'm not going to protect you. In fact, I encourage them to do whatever they want. You're going to have to pay the price. You're going to have to pay the bills.”
Although the conversation was hypothetical and in keeping with Trump's pressure on NATO allies to meet their defense spending obligations during his presidency, President Joe Biden, Democrats and the media have repeatedly misrepresented his remarks.
Biden, for example, repeated the false claim in his State of the Union address in March, and Harris recently repeated the false claim at the Democratic National Convention in August.
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