If I seem overly concerned with the danger of an unhinged president still in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal in the final weeks of his administration, it's not just because he is desperate to retain that power.
It's not just because he has shown that he is willing to try to do so by any means, even those that are illegal, and may well result in mass casualty events.
It's not just because he clearly enjoys chaos and mass destruction. It's not just because he seems willing to burn the country if he isn't allowed to continue ruling it.
It's not just because he has shown little regard for human life.
It's not just because he's so fond of those areas where he can exercise the unilateral power of the presidency, like issuing pardons or launching nuclear weapons.
It's also because he has been obsessed with the “power and importance” of nuclear weapons for more than 50 years.
While I wrote blog posts and made videos warning about this danger while he was running for office, I haven't focused on it since because that Rubicon had been crossed, and I always saw this nuclear danger as an end game scenario, a kind of parting “shot” from a finally defeated Trump.
We are there now.
Many years ago, Trump used his now-suspended Twitter account to warn us that this was a situation we had best avoid, as in this 2013 tweet:
Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2013
And this one a year later:
The global warming we should be worried about is the global warming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the hands of crazy or incompetent leaders!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2014
But we find signs of this obsession 30 years before that tweet.
On 8 April 1984, New York Times magazine ran a piece by William E. Geist about Donald Trump's expanding real estate empire titled "THE EXPANDING EMPIRE OF DONALD TRUMP." It was supposed to be a puff piece promoting the young real estate developer's latest project, Trump Castle:
Donald J. Trump is the man of the hour. Turn on the television or open a newspaper almost any day of the week and there he is, snatching some star from the National Football League, announcing some preposterously lavish project he wants to build. Public-relations firms call him, offering to handle his account for nothing, so that they might take credit for the torrential hoopla....
With castles on the drawing boards, the first tenants are moving into Mr. Trump's $125 million Trump Plaza luxury cooperative apartment building at Third Avenue and 61st. Street. His Generals are off to a winning start in their first season under his ownership. He is hovering attentively over his newly opened Xanadu of conspicuous consumption, the $200 million Trump Tower condominium-office-retail complex on Fifth Avenue, also supervising the final touches on Harrah's at Trump Plaza, a mammoth $220 million casino-hotel in Atlantic City set to open next month.
This puffery drones on like that for more that 6,600 words before Trump takes it in a most unexpected direction:
The football thing is cute, Trump Tower and the piano and all of that, it's all cute, but what does it mean? he says, sounding what borders on a note of uncharacteristic despair.
Asked to explain, he adds: What does it all mean when some wacko over in Syria can end the world with nuclear weapons?
He says that his concern for nuclear holocaust is not one that popped into his mind during any recent made-of-television movie. He says that it has been troubling him since his uncle, a nuclear physicist, began talking to him about it 15 years ago.
And he tells Geist his greatest dream:
His greatest dream is to personally do something about the problem and, characteristically, Donald Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements - he who can talk people into selling $100 million properties to him for $13 million. Negotiations is an art, he says and I have a gift for it.
In a Washington Post interview that same year, 1984, Trump again returned to the question of nuclear war:
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.
It could have been a real boon to humanity had Trump's nuclear obsession really been about nuclear disarmament, but as we have often seen with Trump, he is shrewd enough to portray this obsession in a positive light. Thirty-two years later, after he had won the US presidency, and was actually in a position to move towards nuclear disarmament, what he did was quite the opposite. The LA Times reported, 23 December 2020:
While the country has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic decline and the election, President Trump’s administration quietly and steadily steered America’s nuclear weapons industry to its largest expansion since the end of the Cold War, increasing spending on such arms by billions of dollars with bipartisan congressional support.
Overall, the budget for making and maintaining nuclear warheads has risen more than 50% since Trump was elected in 2016, substantially outpacing the rates of increase for the defense budget and overall federal spending during his presidency before the pandemic. On Monday, Congress approved Trump’s proposal to increase spending next year for the production of such weaponry by nearly $3 billion.
Three years after the Geist piece, in 1987, Ron Rosenbaum did an extensive interview with Trump in the 21 Club for the now defunct Manhattan, inc. In 2016, he reprinted it in Stale. It was to be another puff piece about the high-profile real estate developer. Rosenbaum recounted:
My gig was to take the loudest, glitziest luminaries of the loudest, glitziest era of Manhattan, the power brokers and power lunchers, out to lunch and turn on a tape recorder, and then to profile their self-importance.
The interview was suppose to be promoting Trump's latest project, the Trump Tower Atrium, but mostly what Trump wanted to talk about was The Subject. Rosenbaum said “his PR adviser told him he shouldn’t talk about The Subject at all, he should only be plugging the success of the Trump Tower Atrium,” but when Rosenbaum “heard of Trump’s initial enthusiasm for talking about The Subject,” he was happy to make that the focus:
“I’m dealing at a very high level on this,” [Trump] said. With people in Washington. In the White House. There was too much at stake for him to risk the wrong kind of exposure on The Subject.
The Subject has itself been the subject of considerable delicate pre-lunch negotiations between Trump and the magazine. Trump was enthusiastic when he first heard I wanted to focus on The Subject.
That’s great, he said: The Subject is far more important than any development deal he’s ever done, than any deal of that sort he’ll ever do. The life-or-death nature of The Subject transcends mere real estate. He’s pursuing it as if it were the biggest deal of his life. The Ultimate Deal.
Rosenbaum tells us “The Subject is nuclear weapons proliferation and Trump’s crusade to find a way to halt it before a wild-card nuke deals death to millions.” Trump told him “It’s one of the great problems of the world. Not one of them. It is the.” Here again Trump credits his uncle for starting his obsession:
“My uncle who just passed away was a great scientist. He was a professor at MIT. Dr. John Trump. In fact, together with Dr. Van de Graaff they did the Van de Graaff generator. He was the earliest pioneer in radiation therapy for cancer. He spent his whole life fighting cancer and he ended up dying of it.”
It was his uncle, Trump tells me, who got him started thinking about The Subject.
Probably remembering his PR advisor's advice, he complained “What I would have liked was a story on how well the Atrium at Trump Tower is doing.”
“Well,” I said to Trump, “we can get into that. Would you like to start out by telling me how well the Atrium’s doing?”Later, when he again realized his obsession with nuclear weapons was getting in the way of business, he said:
What followed was the single most surprising moment of our conversation. The one that convinced me that Trump’s interest in the nuke-spread issue was genuine.
He brushed aside my offer to listen to the Atrium success story. And never once returned to it. The master salesman passed up a chance to make a pitch. Instead he returned to The Subject.
“You know, a while ago you asked me to talk about the success of Trump Tower Atrium—it really does pale. It’s hard to get off this subject.”
But the thrills and perils of deal making no longer have the same excitement for Trump these days. Not compared with The Subject.“Nothing matters as much to me now,” Trump says.He’s been “spending so much time on this other thing,” he says, meaning The Subject, that he’s hardly had time to think of conventional deals.
“Those people think that because we have it and the Russians have it, nobody will ever use it because they’re assuming everybody’s not necessarily mad.”And even then, he envisioned a world dominated jointly by the US and Russia:
“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Trump says. “Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries."Probably Marco Rubio was familiar with candidate Trump's obsession in February 2016, when he called him “a lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons.”
In a 1990 Playboy interview, Trump again returned to his obsession:
I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process.
In 1995, when asked on MSNBC where he saw himself in five years, this was his response:
“In five years from now, who knows? Maybe the bombs drop from heaven, who knows? This is a sick world, we’re dealing here with lots of sickos. And you have the nuclear and you have the this and you have the that.”
Hearing the U.S. president promise last week to respond to any North Korean threats with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” was astounding — though perhaps it shouldn't have been. Trump has been publicly discussing his vivid fears about nuclear weapons for decades, predating any serious talk of him running for president. These comments suggest that Trump thinks about nuclear annihilation far more than the average American.
In his single term in the White House, Donald Trump expanded America’s nuclear arsenal and undermined decades of arms-control efforts....1. Trump nudged the Pentagon to double the number of low-yield nuclear weapons, which according to experts raise the risk of nuclear war by making nukes seemingly more “useable” in an armed clash between major powers.At the same time, Trump’s nuclear doctrine expanded the list of external threats that officially justify nuclear retaliation. Perhaps most notably, the list of threats now includes a major hacking event. The U.S. Navy subsequently deployed the low-yield W76-2 variant of its Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile.2. At the opposite end of the yield spectrum, the billionaire president accelerated development of high-yield SLBMs and canceled a Pentagon plan to decommission the megaton-class B83-1 gravity bomb.
The idea that he would ever be allowed to get into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried.
Let us all hope for the best, and do everything we can to remove Trump from office as soon as possible.
Clay Claiborne
See also:
This may be ABC This Week's most dangerous lie yet
Even just impeaching Trump will lower the nuclear threat
No comments:
Post a Comment