Trump the nuclear arms negotiator, circa 1984
by digby
With all of Trump’s nuclear talk and North Korea and the news that the Russians are probably testing nuclear-powered missiles (that are blowing up!), yesterday CNN mentioned this Washington Post Trump profile from 1984, headlined “Donald Trump, Holding All The Cards The Tower! The Team! The Money! The Future!.”
The whole profile shows that the man has not grown at all in even the slightest ways over the past 35 years except his vocabulary has actually shrunk from what was already about a 6th-grade level. This was the passage relating to nuclear warfare:
In the low-key world of New York real estate, where getting publicity can be almost as damaging as being stuck with an empty building, Trump cultivates it. He is often described as a “hustler,” a fast-talking, fast-walking operator who always has an idea and a way to get it into the newspapers.
This morning, Trump has a new idea. He wants to talk about the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets.
He wants to be the negotiator.
He says he has never acted on his nuclear concern. But he says that his good friend Roy Cohn, the flamboyant Republican lawyer, has told him this interview is a perfect time to start.
“Some people have an ability to negotiate,” he says. “It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it or you don’t.”
He would know what to ask the Russians for, he says. But he would rather not tip his hand publicly. “In the event anything happens with respect to me, I wouldn’t want to make my opinions public,” he says. “I’d rather keep those thoughts to myself or save them for whoever else is chosen . . .
“It’s something that somebody should do that knows how to negotiate and not the kind of representatives that I have seen in the past.”
He could learn about missiles, quickly, he says.
“It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles . . . I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation . . . You know who really wants me to do this? Roy . . . I’d do it in a second.”
63 million people voted for this congenitally addled narcissist and they love him to this day.
We are seeing his great “negotiating” skill as president. He insults and crudely attacks his opponents, then back down when they refuse to capitulate while insisting that he’s actually won. It brought him to financial ruin many times over the course of his career and he was allowed to maintain his lifestyle only because his very wealthy father bailed him o0ut over and over again. Now he’s destroying the world, but making sure he is personally gobbling up as much money as he possibly can in the meantime.
His voters don’t care about any of that. They only care that his ugly, ignorant demagoguery is what they’ve been thinking all along. Our problem is something poisonous deep in the culture, not Trump.
Any society that could elevate a narcissistic boob like Trump to the most powerful office in the land has something very wrong with it at its core. As you can see by that article from 35 years ago, it’s not as if he came out of nowhere. Unlike Trump’s non-existent knowledge of missiles and nuclear warfare, we actually did know everything we needed to know about him before he ever entered politics.
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