[Trump} said that he wanted the Europeans to foot the bill for the defense - a bill that doesnt really exist
Yeah, during the beginning of his campaign there was a lot of media reports characterizing Trump as not knowing how NATO was funded, but once he started detailing what he hoped to accomplish it was clear he realized it was 2% of GDP.
I don't know if you are aware, but the US military is under a sequestration that cut military spending by tens of billions USD each year since 2013. The military needed to boost spending to modernize and recover strength. Trump's spending is doing that.
Also, it wasn't Trump who started massive debts, that started back ion the 60's. The wild massive debt problem started in the 90's and has been compounding ever since. Recently, the Great Combover proposed a budget cutting $4.4 trillion--it won't be adopted, though.
Because America spends most of its' defense spending in Asia and the Middle East,
Not sure what you mean by this. US is, in part, modernizing and beefing up its military to counter China's defense modernization, for sure. But, it's doing it in a general way. The reality, though, is a huge sum of US defense spending is for day-to-day operations of the Dept of Defense, which includes Asian and Middle Eastern Operations, but that's just a sliver of the pie. A whole bunch goes toward non-Asian and Mid-eastern operations.
Furthermore it is generally in bad taste to complain about others supposedly not carrying their weight,
when those others are still fighting in a war that you started and in which you asked for their help.
Now you know what it's like to be an American. ;). All the bitching and moaning from across the Atlantic we've endured over the past 80 years to bring and keep peace and prosperity to your beautiful continent is voluminous, and all we ask for is you keep your promise to spend 2% of GDP and help us keep each other safer by fighting terror in the terrorists neighborhood (I'll concede that Iraq was a monumental blunder--Afghanistan is legit, although it needs to end). Are we really asking too much?
NATO nations--other than Turkey--should realize that China is a threat and it doesn't respect weakness. I believe Trump is right to prod NATO in that direction. The stronger each individual NATO member country is, the stronger the alliance is (and, yes, the less the US will need to spend to offset the defense shortcomings of other NATO countries).