Sometime in the spring, date unknown, Donald Trump grills Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Bernard Lown about his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Lown is under the impression that he’s having lunch with Trump to discuss funding for cardiovascular research, but Trump has a different plan. He needs to know about Gorbachev. He’s going to call the president and become an ambassador to the Soviet Union.
He said to me, “I hear you met with Gorbachev, and you had a long interview with him, and you’re a doctor, so you have a good assessment of who he is.” So I asked, “Why would you want to know?” And he responded, “I intend to call my good friend Ronnie,” meaning Reagan, “to make me a plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev.” Those are the words he used. And he said he would go to Moscow and he’d sit down with Gorbachev, and then he took his thumb and he hit the desk and he said, “And within one hour the Cold War would be over!” I sat there dumbfounded.
Dr. Bernard Lown
Lown spends 20 minutes going over his meeting with Gorbachev and answering questions about how the de facto leader of the Soviet Union behaves. It’s the first and last time that Lown ever encounters Donald Trump.
This is just the latest story of Trump’s interest in working with Russia. He made his interest public about two years ago, but no one knows his motivation. Trump becomes even more vocal about working with Russia’s military after meeting the KGB in Moscow. He starts calling nuclear war “The Subject.”
The idea that he would ever be allowed to got 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.
The New York Times, 1984
External Sources
The Hollywood Reporter (Archived)
Photo: Source unknown, obtained from Inlander
