Sometime in November 1985, an interview is released in which Donald Trump says he wants to partner with Russia / the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons and dominate Third World countries. He claims he is in talks with people in Washington and the White House.
Update 7/9/24: This file was previously dated August 1987 due to a mixup by our source material from Slate. Today we received evidence that this interview was published in November 1985. See the magazine cover below.
The following excerpt, while long, is only a fraction the original article linked below. I’ve included only the most significant parts in this excerpt.
“I’m dealing at a very high level on this,” he 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…
So what’s the solution [to France selling nuclear technology to Pakistan]? I ask him. How do you get the French to stop, how do you get French technology out of the hands of the Pakistanis at this point?
“I think you have to come down on them very hard economically or whatever way,” Trump says. “I think the solution is largely economic. Because there are so many of these countries that are so fragile and we have a vast power that’s never been used. They depend on us for food, for medical supplies. And I would never even suggest using it except on this issue. But this issue supersedes all other things… I guess the easy thing would be to say you go in and clean it out… I don’t necessarily want to advocate that publicly because it comes off radical.”
…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. Because he’s on the track of a much bigger kind of deal, his Ultimate Deal. The Trump Plan…
So what is the deal Trump thinks can be done? What is the Trump Plan?
It’s a deal with the Soviets… The only answer is for the Big Two to make a deal now to step in and prevent the next generation of nations about to go nuclear from doing so. By whatever means necessary.
“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. So we should use our power of economic retaliation and they use their powers of retaliation and between the two of us we will prevent the problem from happening. It would have been better having done something five years ago.”…
“Maybe we should offer [those countries] something. I’m saying you start off as nicely as possible. You apply as much pressure as necessary until you achieve the goal. You start off telling them, ‘Let’s get rid of it.’ If that doesn’t work you then start cutting off aid. And more aid and then more. You do whatever is necessary so these people will have riots in the street, so they can’t get water. So they can’t get Band-Aids, so they can’t get food. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to do it — the people, the riots.”
…Trump drops enough names, off the record, to convince me he does have high-level contacts, that he may indeed be “dealing at a very high level on this.”
Ron Rosenbaum, Slate
Trump’s desire to have riots in the streets is repeated in 2014 in an interview with Fox News. There’s one major difference, though. In 2014, Donald Trump want riots in the streets of the United States. Read more.
