Trump and his enablers want you to believe that, if he were still president, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. These are the easiest kind of lies to tell because they are impossible to fact check. We can’t go back in time for a do-over to see what Putin would have done if the former guy was still in the White House.

Of course, we can go back in time to remind folks about how Trump treated NATO. He constantly berated both the alliance and individual members. For example, he once told NATO’s president that Germany was totally controlled by Russia. Angela Merkel, who was the German Chancellor at the time, shot back.

“I want to say that I have experience of when a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union,” she told reporters.

“I am very happy that today we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany. Because of that we can say that we can make our independent policies and make independent decisions.

“That is very good, especially for people in eastern Germany.”

That same week Trump took a swipe at British Prime Minister Theresa May.

In the midst of a week that has seen Mrs. May parrying threats to her hold on power, Mr. Trump criticized her strategy on cutting ties to the European Union, cast doubt on whether he was willing to negotiate a new trade deal between Britain and the United States and praised Mrs. May’s Conservative party rival, Boris Johnson, who resigned this week as foreign secretary, as a potentially great prime minister.

We can speculate about whether it’s a coincidence that Trump chose to attack two women heads of state, but that could be a topic for another day.

A clear pattern emerged during Trump’s presidency. He consistently sowed division between the U.S. and our NATO allies. But it was even worse than that, as the New York Times reported in 2019.

There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.

Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.

Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization…

In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance.

Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton wrote in his book that Trump repeatedly talked about wanting to quit the alliance, saying “I don’t give a s— about NATO.” John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, was also described as saying that “one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.”

In his letter resigning as Trump’s Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis identified his own values that were in conflict with the president’s.

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies…NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America.

After meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Trump and Tucker Carlson questioned whether the United States should follow through on our NATO commitment to defend a member who was attacked.

So in public, Trump was sowing divisions with our NATO allies, and in private, he continually expressed a desire to pull the U.S. out of the alliance. All of that has been known for years. It is safe to assume that, at minimum, Putin was cheering Trump on from the sidelines.

Trump’s treatment of NATO is especially important as it becomes the major bulwark against Russian aggression in Ukraine. One of the many ways that Putin miscalculated is that he obviously assumed that the divisions Trump had sown would keep the alliance from coming together against his invasion. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Even Condoleezza Rice said that Putin has managed to unite NATO in a way that she hasn’t seen since the end of the Cold War. Of course, Putin’s actions have been the reason for that unity, but President Biden deserves a tremendous amount of credit for working to heal the divisions that Trump created.

In the end, Putin has always wanted to take control of Ukraine – especially since the people of that country ousted his puppet, Viktor Yanukovyc, in 2014. Trump’s attacks on NATO were meant to pave the way for that to happen. The former guy can spread his own delusions all he wants. But we watched him in action for four years and know it’s a lie.