“So, why are we why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO if they're not going to be with us? ... This country should not be paying trillions of dollars to NATO.”

The actual U.S. payment to NATO is under $1 billion a year, not "trillions" or "hundreds of billions." Under NATO's agreed cost-share formula, the United States is responsible for about 15 percent of NATO's direct common funding, which NATO says totals roughly $6.3 billion for the entire 32-nation alliance in 2026. Trump's "trillions" claim overstates the real figure by more than three orders of magnitude.

CNN's April 15, 2026 fact check found Trump was doing what he "has done for years": conflating America's own national defense budget, roughly $1 trillion in fiscal 2026, spent on the U.S. military by U.S. decision, with money "paid to NATO." The Pentagon budget is not a payment to NATO; the U.S. would fund its own military with or without the alliance. NATO's own published rules make the structure plain: the alliance "is resourced through the direct and indirect contributions of its members," with three modest common-funded budgets covering headquarters, the command structure and shared infrastructure, around EUR 5.3 billion total in 2026, split among all 32 allies by a formula based on national income. No accounting method gets the U.S. share anywhere near "hundreds of billions a year." "The US does not actually pay NATO trillions of dollars or spend hundreds of billions per year on NATO." — Daniel Dale, CNN Fact Check, April 15, 2026