In Moscow Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed the Trump administration's foreign policy as "ambiguous and contradictory" while NATO's Stoltenberg praised it. Many of them defended Trump the way these people did.
Trump's latest statements are seen as a sudden change of his campaign rhetoric during which he criticized the military alliance and called it outdated.
Lt. Gen. HR McMaster, Trump's new national security adviser, is similarly thought to embrace the alliance.
Mr Trump said he has growing concerns about Russia's support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and questioned Moscow's role in a suspected chemical attack in Syria's rebel-held Khan Sheikhun town on April 4.
Trump has long insisted the United States carries too much of the burden within the defense collective, and had angrily lambasted other nations for not spending sufficient amounts on defense. Its involvement in that war came after the United States invoked NATO's Article 5, the provision calling for collective defense, after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Trump's U-turn in foreign policy came amid infighting within his administration that has lately seen a decline in the influence of political operatives, mainly his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, whose former publication Breitbart News is under FBI investigation for links to Russian Federation.
On Wednesday, following his meeting with Stoltenberg, Trump, who had been a frequent critic of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, declared the alliance "no longer obsolete" and called on its 29 member countries to join together against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and to fight terrorism - but he repeated his campaign demand that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation "pay what they owe" to the United States. In the days since, Trump administration commentary on Syria sounded much like that of the Obama administration, which called for Assad to step down and for Russian Federation to drop its support.
Trump expresses support for French candidate Le Pen
While a Le Pen win is not the consensus view of the market, some have suggested her odds may be better than people think. A Harris Interactive poll on Thursday showed Macron and Le Pen still in front, with the gap a bit wider than before.
Currently, just the U.S. and a handful of other countries are meeting the 2% target.
NATO, he asserted can and must do more in the global fight against terrorism.
But there has been progress on that front, too. "We're going to see how that all works out".
Later in the campaign though, Mr Trump seemed to have moderated that opposition, and two Democratic senators said earlier this year that the president told them he had come around to supporting the agency.
Some experts think that Russia's military activities have been a bigger driver of defense spending increases than Trump's pressure, particularly among the alliance's eastern members. At a press conference last July, he said: "I never met Putin, I don't know who Putin is".
But he warned that, although tacking back and forth is fine, it is risky to be "all over the map" because people stop believing what you say. "He has helped by having such a strong focus on the importance of burden sharing and defense spending".
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