Donald Trump's bizarre speech to NATO last week was yet another opportunity for America's fact-checkers to do that thing they do, patiently explaining that even though this orange-hued fellow keeps huffing about the members of NATO owing us some cash, that is not even remotely how this works.

But Trump is really talking about indirect funding. Since 2006, each NATO member has had a guideline of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense spending. At a 2014 summit, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, NATO members pledged to meet that guideline by 2024.

That's it. That's the whole story, right there. NATO members have agreed that by 2024, two presidential elections in America-years, each country would hike defense spending to 2 percent in order to boost European defenses. A few are there, and most aren't. There's no penalty if the goal isn't met. It won't affect American defense spending much, if at all, because we here in America would consider a defense budget of only 2 percent of our GDP to be an affront to our American Way Of Life and quite possibly treasonous to even propose. But the other NATO member states are, understandably, rather twitchy about Russian military aggression on their doorstep and have decided they'll be boosting their own spending as deterrent.

From this, Donald Trump has spun the fanciful tale that the members of NATO have been holding out on us, 'Merica, and seems to be under the impression that the other NATO leaders ought to be cutting us a check—and even more than that, that other NATO countries are for some reason obliged to meet the 2024 spending goals retroactively, based on his say-so, and write additional checks for each past year they haven't met the future goal.

This is self-evidently stupid. It has also become, for Donald Trump, a confusion-turned-conspiracy roughly equivalent to that surrounding Agenda 21, the nonbinding United Nations statement on sustainable development quickly made famous in certain deeply gullible conservative circles as allegedly being everything from an insidious plot to overthrow American government to a plan to overthrow civilization itself and live in mud huts alongside our favorite cattle. Whether Trump is peddling this new anti-NATO notion as "misleading" tactic to rile up his base or whether he is stone-cold stupid and honestly cannot grasp the situation is, as always, up for debate.