Biden campaign highlights Trump's 'shameful' NATO remarks in battleground ad

The Biden campaign on Friday unveiled a fresh ad targeting former President Trump’s recent comments calling into question his commitment to NATO allies.

The 60-second digital ad is set to run through Super Tuesday and is aimed at voters in Michigan, WIsconsin and Pennsylvania, which the campaign said are home to more than 2.5 million Americans who identify as Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian.

“Trump wants to walk away from NATO. He’s even given Putin the green light to attack America’s allies,” the ad states, calling the former president’s rhetoric “shameful,” “weak” and “un-American.”

At a recent rally in South Carolina, Trump indicated he told other NATO members that he would not protect them from an attack if they had not contributed enough to meet the alliance’s defense spending targets.

“You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?” Trump said. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

Biden himself has attacked Trump over those comments, while the NATO secretary-general has warned they undermine the security of alliance members.

“President Biden is right: Trump’s attempts to appease dictators like Putin are ‘dumb,’ ‘shameful,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘un-American,’” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “The bottom line is that the only person Donald Trump is loyal to is Donald Trump – not to our allies and certainly not to the American people. And while he thinks that sucking up to Putin and other dictators will make him strong, the American people know him for who he truly is: a coward and a loser.”

The campaign ad was released hours after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in prison.

The Russian Federal Prison Service said Navalny felt unwell after a walk and lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived, and its crew tried to rehabilitate him but was unsuccessful, it added.

Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, and in December was moved from a different prison to the highest-security level facility in the country near the Arctic Circle. The “special regime” penal colony prison in the town of Kharp, which is about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, is in a remote area known for its severe winters.

Navalny has been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Russia after recovering from a poisoning that he blamed on Putin, who has denied trying to kill Navalny with a nerve agent.