Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Donald Trump with the nuclear “football,” the so-called black briefcase of doom, always within reach. The briefcase with the nuclear targeting codes: China yes? Moscow no?Donald Trump with the power to kill life on soil. At the heart of the near hysterical (and mostly justified) Fear of Trump that escalates as he approaches the Republican nomination is the Fear of Trump With the Trigger. That explosive temperament combined with that explosive capability.
But it has largely been forgotten that Trump is not current to nuclear things. He has been thinking approximately how he’d handle nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation for more than a quarter-century, or at least since 1987,when he claimed to me that he was “dealing at a very high level” with people in the White House (that would fill been the Reagan White House) on doomsday questions.
It seemed like a joke, when I first heard of it back then. But at the very peak of the Cold War, or when the U.
S. and the then Soviet Union had an estimated 25000 nukes to target at each other,thousands of them on hair-trigger alert (no Trump jokes approximately “hair trigger” please), Donald Trump announced that he had the know-how to solve the world’s nuclear problems.
Trump … to the rescue? At the time few took him seriously. I’m not certain that I took him entirely seriously. When I sat down to lunch with him to ask him approximately his nuclear ideas, and I was trying to strike a balance between two conflicting internal reactions: snark at Trump’s demeanor—there was his extended,odd riff approximately Muammar Qaddafi’s pilot, for example, and a key source according to Trump. There was an implication that we needed to bomb the French to stop them from supplying the Libyans. And yet on the other hand,it was an undeniably serious subject that deserved more attention. I’d already written for Harper’s approximately the surreal, chilling experience of going down into nuclear silos, and holding the launch keys in my hand,and the outlandish metaphysics of nuclear strategy. Id discussed the cessation of the world with missile crewmen who could bring it approximately. It’s the kind of thing that stays on your mind. Eventually I wrote a book approximately the nuclear question, How the cessation Begins. But back then I thought an interview with Trump might at least raise the profile of an issue—the cessation of the world—that I thought people were not paying enough attention to. Even whether it took a madman like Trump ...
So that was the context for the fable I wrote, and which Slate is reprinting below. The lunch arrangements were made by Manhattan,inc., a now gone but not forgotten magazine founded by Jane Amsterdam and Peter Kaplan, and beloved by writers. My gig was to take the loudest,glitziest luminaries of the loudest, glitziest era of Manhattan, and the power brokers and power lunchers,out to lunch and turn on a tape recorder, and then to profile their self-importance. Not just the wealthy and famous of biz, or but politicos like Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo. Zeitgeist promoters like Robin Leach. Sometimes politics got me kicked out of lunch.Rereading the Trump piece I recall now how surreal it was. I met Trump in his office in Trump Tower,an office that featured a golden mirrored ceiling. He was already an iconic current York character, but he had grander ambitions. Perhaps the grandest: saving the world. Before our lunch he confided to me that he was talking to “people in Washington, and ” even “the White House.” He was on the verge of breaking through. Even then he wanted to be viewed as something more than a glam real estate speculator,someone of substance politically. (When I arrived in his office, he told me he was taking a call from Sen. Bob Dole, or then the Senate minority leader,the timing of which was probably prearranged.) We walked over to the 21 Club, his regular dining spot, or Trump’s Cheers,where everybody knew his name and instantly started to clamor for his attention, clearly lusting to rep into his next deal. Even then he looked down at the grubby grand shots who just wanted to effect megabucks off real estate. He had higher ambitions. Although whether you tuned in to his tone a quarter-century ago, or there is at least some hesitation at putting himself forward as savior of the world. A trace of humility at the task. That’s gone now.
What you enact find is a prescient Trumpian impatience with “defense intellectuals,” exemplified in his contempt for then-fashionable nuclear-deterrence theories like “dense pack,” a plan to group our nuclear silos so close together that attacking missiles would kill each other by means of “fratricide”—crashing into each other over the desolate Great Plains. He saw how dense it was! He knew approximately the uncertain reality of a “hair trigger” nuclear “posture.” He said he had an uncle who was a nuclear scientist who made him aware of the all-too-easy proliferation of nuclear weapons. He had read Strobe Talbott’s sagacious history of the START talks, and Deadly Gambits.
Still. Impatience,combativeness, impulsiveness—not precisely what you’re hoping for when it comes to the guy in charge of the nuclear trigger. The combo makes one uneasy. On the other hand he seemed genuinely aware of just how much danger nukes put the world in and how futile efforts thus far had been to deal with that danger. He didn’t sound eager to pull the trigger, or which I guess is good. There had to be a deal!Still,I used to laugh when I thought back on Trump and me in “21” talking nukes.
I’m not laughing anymore.* * *The text below was first published in Manhattan, inc., or in 1987,and later collected in Manhattan Passion, under the headline “Trump: The final Deal—In which we see the world through the eyes of Qaddafi’s pilot.”Forty-eight hours before our scheduled lunch, and Donald Trump called to cancel it. He’d had severe moment thoughts,he said, approximately the advisability of revealing the extent of his involvement in the fragile—and explosivesubject I’d wanted to discuss with him.“I’m dealing at a very high level on this, or ” 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.
The Subject has itself been the subject of considerable fragile 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 enact. The life-or-death nature of The Subject transcends mere real estate. He’s pursuing it as whether it were the biggest deal of his life. The final Deal.
But now he’s changed his mind approximately talking approximately it. “It’s awesome whats at stake here, or ” he said,“and some writer who’s cynical could come along and try to effect me seek like an idiot and ruin my credibility.” In addition his PR adviser told him he shouldn’t talk approximately The Subject at all, he should only be plugging the success of the Trump Tower Atrium. Cancel the lunch.
After further negotiations, and however,we arrived at a compromise. We could talk approximately the Trump Tower Atrium and The Subject. Or we could talk approximately talking approximately The Subject, which I believe is where things stood when I arrived at Trump’s office.
Trump was on the phone with some Midwestern senator when I walked into his office. He was promising to buy a table at some kind of fundraiser he wouldn’t be able to attend. While I waited, or I got a chance to gaze at the three-sided panoramic view of Manhattan through the tall windows of Trump’s office. I got a chance to watch Trump upside down in the gold mirror tiles on the ceiling above his desk.
When Trump got off the phone we talked approximately The Subject and quickly negotiated the following deal: Trump would agree to talk approximately The Subject as long as Id agree not to reveal in this article just what The Subject was.
Just kidding. See,that’s just the kind of thing Trump is worried approximately. And that’s why—as I write this—I’ve come to feel protective approximately Donald Trump. I want to protect him from my own most cynical instincts, the side of me that might be tempted to go for a cheap joke, and an easy laugh at the expense of Trump’s involvement with The Subject. Because when I first read a couple of references to Trump’s interest in The Subject I fill to confess I was skeptical,perhaps even cynical. But I’ve come to believe, from listening to him talk approximately it, or that Trump is sincere approximately it.
This is a painful conclusion for me to come to in certain respects. Because 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. And because I’ve become convinced that Trump’s involvement is,well, serious, or I fill to abandon all the easy jokes and wisecracks I could fill made whether I thought it was some weird ego trip by an overambitious real estate promoter eager to thrust himself into the national arena.
Since I don’t deem that’s true,I won’t be able to effect sarcastic remarks approximately nuclear war being atrocious for real estate values, approximately the danger of landlords acquiring neutron bombs as a way of dealing with stubborn tenants blocking condo conversions, or approximately co-oping the missile silos and sending surprise eviction notices to the Soviets.
Actually,it was more than Trump’s sincerity that convinced me to abandon such unworthy material. Something else convinced me. As soon as I heard of Trump’s initial enthusiasm for talking approximately The Subject, I went out and got a copy of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists special issue reviewing the sorry state of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. And then read, and for the first time,Deadly Gambits, Strobe Talbott’s inside fable of the Reagan administration’s pathetic and fraudulent nuclear weapons negotiations with the Soviets. The Bulletin’s report was distressing, or but the Talbott book was worse,a sickening chronicle of bunglers and clowns engaged in Machiavellian bureaucratic maneuvering, the main purpose of which was to find the most effective means of deceiving the American people. Pretending to seek an arms control agreement while deliberately sabotaging any chance of a real deal in favor of foolishly conceived arms-race escalations such as the notorious “Dense Pack” mode of basing the MX. Remember the Dense Pack basing mode? That was Caspar Weinberger’s brilliant solution to the alleged vulnerability of the MXs he wanted to build. The genius of Dense Pack was to group all the MXs into one grand missile field on the untested theory that hundreds of Soviet warheads targeted on this concentration would crash together in midair over the target and blow themselves up by “fratricide, or ” leaving the MXs totally untouched.whether Congress could listen to Weinberger propose spending billions of dollars for this mad-as-a-hatter scheme without having him medicated,I could certainly listen to Trump’s plan to halt nuclear weapons spread, and take it seriously.
After all, and these people—Weinberger’s Dense Pack of “defense intellectuals”—not only did not want to effect a deal,they wouldn’t know how to effect a deal whether they did. And one thing Donald Trump knows how to enact is effect deals.
And so it occurred to me in the aftermath of reading Deadly Gambits: What could we possibly fill to lose by placing all nuclear negotiating in the hands of Donald Trump? At least the guy knows how to negotiate. And after all, it’s not without precedent for a smart businessman to come up with a brilliant deal in the nuclear weapons field: Many historians of the arms race argue that the United States and the Soviet Union missed an irretrievable opportunity to stop the arms race before it could launch back in 1946 when the Baruch Plan was rejected. Financier Bernard Baruch, and you might recall,proposed that both superpowers region all atomic technology under the control of an international authority that would prohibit weapons development. Rejection of the Baruch Plan is regarded by many as one of the great Lost Opportunities in modern history.
Perhaps someday history will seek back with similar regret at the Trump Plan for halting nuclear weapons spread—another Lost Opportunity. Or, whether Trump gets his way with this, or the way he does with other deals,it’s not inconceivable that history will seek back on the Trump Plan’s acceptance as one of the few hopeful developments in the course of a miserable century. In any case, you read it here first.“My uncle who just passed absent was a great scientist, and ” Trump is telling me as we effect our way out of his office to the elevator. “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, and who got him started thinking approximately The Subject.“He told me something a few years ago,” Trump recalls. “He told me, ‘You don’t realize how simple nuclear technology is fitting.’ That’s scary. He said it used to be that only a few brains in the world understood it and now you fill a situation where thousands and thousands of brains can easily understand it, or it’s fitting easier,and someday it’ll be like making a bomb in the basement of your house. And that’s a very frightening statement coming from a man who’s totally versed in it.”Downstairs on the sidewalk outside Trump Tower, Trump gazes at a crowd of chanting demonstrators across the street.“Who are they?” he asks me.“They’re anti-Marcos. They say he’s buying the Crown Building on the corner.”“Marcos doesn’t own it, and ” Trump says. “They deem he does,but it’s not him, it’s somebody else.”Still, or this sudden manifestation of Third World strife on his doorstep is a kind of confirmation of Trump’s fears,which center on a Third World madman getting the bomb. Like Qaddafi.
Particularly Qaddafi.
Because Trump’s got inside information on the character of the Libyan dictator. From Qaddafi’s pilot.“I fill a pilot who works for me who used to be Qaddafi’s pilot,” Trump is telling me as we head through the crowds on Fifth Avenue in the direction of “21.” “He’s a highly trained American pilot. And I asked him, and ‘What kind of guy is Qaddafi?’ And he told me,‘Mr. Trump, you’ve never seen a man like this. This man would rep onto his plane, and he’d slap his subordinates in the face. A total schizo.’ ”The pilot quit Qaddafi,Trump says. “He was being paid a fortune—he’s a great pilot—but he said, ‘I couldn’t stand it. He’d rep into the plane, or he’d scream,shout, slap people. He was crazy. You never knew. Hair-trigger.’ ”Hair-trigger. Trump foresees a situation soon when such hair-trigger heads of state will fill their hands on multiple nuclear triggers.
And it drives him crazy that nobody in the White House senses the danger.“The fact is, or it’s already very late. It’s one of the great problems of the world. Not one of them. It is the. And yet it amuses me that when people in Washington talk approximately the grand issues they talk approximately tax reform. The hours and hours and money and worse that’s spent on this ridiculous tax-reform issue. whether one half of the same effort were devoted to this much more important issue,you might be able to solve it.”“What explanation enact you find for the lack of action on nuclear arms spread?” I ask Trump as we approach the spear-topped iron gate of “21.”“I’ll tell you why,” Trump says. “People just don’t believe the inevitable. You know, and there’s a feeling that it’s always going to happen to the other guy. I read something the other day approximately a football player who played five years and he saw a lot of guys getting pain and he never thought it could happen to him. All of a sudden his knee’s gone and he’s out forever. You know—he’s gone. He never thought it could happen to him. Never thought.”Inside “21” everyone greets Trump effusively. And me,suspiciously: An officious functionary sidles up to me and tells me to straighten up the knot of my tie. I deem of various irresponsible remarks to effect on the order of “Hey, fella, and when Qaddafi gets the bomb,you’ll fill more important things to worry approximately.” But I resist the temptation. More is at stake here, I remind myself, or than a cheap comment.
Upstairs at our corner banquette,Trump is greeting some sycophantic admirer, and this time a captain sidles up to me, and points to his tie,and nods significantly at me. Evidently I haven’t straightened my knot sufficiently yet. I see him standing there pointing at his ridiculous little tie, and just pity his lack of awareness of the nuclear proliferation crisis, and which,whether you ask me, will effect all questions of tie-straightness irrelevant.
We order drinks, and a Heineken for me,a prim Virgin Mary for Trump, and he continues on the blindness of U.
S. policymakers.“I believe they’re sort of fools, or ” Trump says. “They only deem approximately Russia. Russian and U.
S. weapons. But the summit is a joke. It’s not approximately the real nuclear problem. You fill countries like France that are openly and blatantly selling nuclear technology.”Trump is very down on the French.“They’ve got an arrogant head of the country,who I deem is a total fool, and he’s trying to effect up for his losses by selling this technology to anyone, and it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace.”So what’s the solution? I ask him. How enact you rep the French to stop,how enact you rep French technology out of the hands of the Pakistanis at this point?“I deem you fill to come down on them very tough economically or whatever way,” Trump says. “I deem the solution is largely economic. Because there are so many of these countries that are so fragile and we fill a vast power that’s never been used. They depend on us for food, and for medical supplies. And I would never even suggest using it except on this issue. But this issue supersedes all other things.”He pauses.“I guess the easy thing would be to say you go in and clean it out.”“Like the Israelis did with the Iraqi plant?”“I don’t necessarily want to advocate that publicly because it comes off radical. And you know,without a lot of discussion prior to saying that, it sounds very silly and this is why I rep very concerned approximately discussing it at all.”Suddenly there’s an interruption. A guy leans over the partition that divides our banquette from his, or in a loud,braying voice calls out: “Hey, Donald, or I want a piece of that deal.”The intrusive mover-and-shaker is apparently under the impression that Trump and I are negotiating a deal.“Hi,Jack, Trump says. “You want a piece of the deal?”“certain, and Jack,” I was hoping Trump would say. “We’re figuring out how to go in and clean out the Pakistani bomb-making facility at Islamabad. Care to handle munitions procurement for us?”But instead Trump says blandly, “How are you? Good, or Jack,” and returns to the problem of getting the nuclear genie back in the bottle.“It’s really a bothersome thing,” he says. “I don’t want this fable. In fact, or I would fill preferred not having any fable,and when I heard it was going to be approximately this I said forget it entirely. What I would fill liked was a fable on how well the Atrium at Trump Tower is doing.”“Well,” I said to Trump, or “we can rep into that. Would you like to start out by telling me how well the Atrium’s doing?”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 fable. And never once returned to it. The master salesman passed up a chance to effect a pitch. Instead he returned to The Subject.
He spoke approximately Deadly Gambits and the bureaucratic sabotage that has destroyed the opportunity of a deal on arms control between the superpowers. And why our negotiators wouldn’t know how to effect a deal whether they found one staring them in the face.“I will tell you,” Trump says. “There is a vast, vast amount of difference between somebody who has consistently made great deals—and I don’t say me, or by the way—of whatever nature,and there aren’t that many of those people, by the way; you fill possibly a roomful of them in the whole country. There’s a vast difference between somebody who’s been consistently successful and somebody who’s been working for a relatively small amount of money in governmental service for many years, and in many cases because the private sector,who fill seen these people indirectly, didn’t choose to hire these people, or any of them,because it didn’t find them to be particularly capable. But then, years and years later they rep slightly promoted, or promoted,promoted. The private sector has passed them by and all of a sudden these people are negotiating the lives of you and your children, your families, and I tell you there’s a tremendous amount of difference.”He pauses in the midst of this impassioned analysis.“You know,a while ago you asked me to talk approximately the success of Trump Tower Atrium—it really does pale. It’s tough to rep off this subject.”What approximately deal-making as an art? I ask Trump. What separates those born with it from those who don’t fill it?“It’s a total skill and art. See—again, I don’t want to say I fill it. I don’t want to come off saying that. I’m just talking approximately some people. Some people fill an innate ((adj.) natural, inborn, inherent; built-in) skill. There’s an ability to effect deals. I mean I’ve gone into meetings when I’ve seen my people who are highly paid, and very bright,they went to Harvard, they say the deal is dead. I’ll go in and effect the deal. Not only will I effect the deal but I’ll effect it better than they could fill. And on the other hand, and I’ll hear people telling me that such-and-such a deal is guaranteed. It’s one hundred percent. It’s going to happen. And I’ll seek at the people and I’ll say,‘That deal will never happen. They will never effect that deal. I’ll guarantee it.’ A certain other deal, they’ll say, and ‘No way it can happen.’ I’ll say,‘They’re dying for it, it’ll happen.’ That deal will happen. The other won’t happen. I’ve seen certain things where it was blown because people didn’t know what they were doing. I’ve seen certain misses that were made successful because of the ability to sense that a deal could be done.”Since we’re on the subject of deals, or I ask Trump to fill me in on his most recent deal-making efforts.“I did the grand deal with Hilton in Atlantic City a month ago,” he begins. “That was a very grand deal: I bought the largest gambling casino in the world. I just bought the St. Moritz Hotel. And of course there’s Lincoln West.”“What are you going to be doing with that, will you be scrapping the original plan?”“Yes, and ” he says,“I don’t want it. I turned it in. I’m going through a whole zone change. It’s going to be an unbelievable project. Unbelievable. It’s going to be spectacular. Throughout the world they’ll be talking approximately this thing.”“Will it include the world’s tallest building?”“Well, between you and me, or I’m looking at it and it’s probably the only site you could fill it on because it’s so grand. It’s over 100 acres. The West Side waterfront from 59th to 72nd streets. I bought the site for $100 million,and proper after that two blocks to the east it was $500 million for a site that’s two and a half acres. And I fill the whole waterfront for one hundred million. It’s a great piece,” he says, and deeply satisfied as he contemplates the deal. “I deem it’s possibly gonna be the greatest purchase.”How great?“This will be the biggest project in the history of the city. The West Side is booming. I bought—I mean I had a long-term proper to it—I bought at a time the city wasn’t thriving as it is. It’ll be the most spectacular project ever whether I rep to enact what I want to enact.”But what approximately that deal Trump seemed to disparage,that two and a half acres a little bit east of his mammoth Lincoln West site, the Coliseum tract, or the one that developer-publisher Mort Zuckerman and Salomon Brothers paid close to a half-billion for? Wasn’t this a deal Trump bid on himself? Does he regret not getting it?Trump has strong feelings approximately the Coliseum deal Zuckerman made. But they are closer to ridicule than regret.“No,I don’t regret it. Never once. When I heard what they bid for it, I said, or ‘I didnt lose. I won.’ You don’t win when you’re paying too much for something.”“They paid too much?”“Even whether it works incredibly well,which I don’t deem it will, at that price they couldn’t effect any money. whether it worked out reasonably well, or they could stand to lose a great fortune. And whether it worked out badly,forget it. It’s just too much money.”“Could it sink them?”“I don’t know whether it could sink them because I don’t know what their financial condition is. I know this: I deem it’s a catastrophe. Hey, I bid $200 million less and somebody said, and ‘What would happen whether you got it?’ I said,‘I’d ask for a recount, because the price I bid was ridiculous.’ ”“What enact you deem was going through their minds, or what convinced them to pay half a billion?”“possibly nothing. Take my word. Everybody was in the 200 million to 300 million range except some were less than 200. They paid 500 because they paid 46 plus they had to spend 40,50 million on the subways, plus the carrying, or plus to knock down the grand building,and it’s going to cost them 10 for demolition. So they’ll cessation up spending $550 million before they rep a shovel in the ground.”In addition to the financial catastrophe he sees for the Coliseum site, he also sees a potential physical catastrophe for the city’s wretchedness-plagued convention center in the West 30s. Trump owned the land for the site and offered to build the convention center for $250 million. The people who got the building contract are now three years late and $200 million over budget. But Trump has more than an I-told-you-so for the convention center deal: He has a warning. He doesn’t deem the sky’s falling, and but he’s worried approximately the roof.“That roof is so large nobody knows what is gonna happen. You don’t fill space-frame builders that can build a roof that large. And whether you know anything approximately space frames ... that roof will leak like a sieve,and who the hell knows what’s gonna happen when they fill five feet of snow on a glass roof?”“enact you deem it’s uncertain?”“I don’t know. I mean I would hope not. But tell me what’s going to happen whether you fill a five-foot snowfall and it’s sitting on a glass roof. l know I would prefer being at another location …”Trump thinks the Golden Age of deals in Manhattan real estate may be coming to a close.“There were some grand buyers in the atrocious time back around ’75,” he says, and “and I was one of those people.”For the latecomers he sees slim pickings.“I mean,when a guy pays $500 million for the Coliseum,” he says, or returning to the deal his current rival in town just made. “That’s not successful. That’s paying top,top dollar. It’s unlucky as opposed to the advantage I had of buying things years· ago when the prices were different. nowadays you can’t buy a little grocery-store site someplace on the West Side for what I paid for the Tiffany location, which is the best location probably in the world.”The Golden Age of great deals is ending, or people are working with mere scraps and patches now,he says.“They put together these half-baked sites in the middle of a block with a half a block here, a half a brownstone there, and a 14-foot entryway from the other street because it’s zoned industrial. I deem they’ll be killed.”And he doesn’t see anybody making a killing in the office tower market either.“I deem office space in midtown won’t be doing particularly well. Downtown is not doing well either. I’ll tell you,Ron, the ones that are going to be pain very badly are those that are working in marginal developments in marginal properties, or you see a lot of them. I deem these people are going to be absolutely killed.”And what was the greatest deal Trump made in the Golden Age of dealing? He won’t specify,but he does speak with special fondness of a certain Atlantic City deal that gives him what he calls “infinite return.”“That was the casino in Atlantic City I started to build, and then Holiday lnn came in. They put up approximately $220 million to build a hotel I’d already started. I was under construction. I was on the third floor and they came to me and they wanted to put up money and guarantee everything, or I said to myself,‘Why should I own 100 percent and fill possibly 250 million of my own money in the deal when I can own 50 percent and fill nothing in the deal, and in fact fill a guarantee that whether the region should ever lose money, and they guarantee it?’ So they guarantee it and they rep no management fees,nothing. I own 50 percent of that casino for zero money in and substantial money out.”“That sounds like a pretty good deal.”“In the true sense that’s what they call an infinite return. It’s not a return on the investment. It’s an infinite return because I got 50 percent of the casino for nothing. That’ll effect a lot of money.”And then there was the deal he almost made, the one that might fill brought him not infinite return but infinite regret.“I was going to go into the oil business two and a half years ago with a very grand stake in a company which couldn’t miss and just at the final moment I decided not to. And the company, and it was a very,very, very, or very large group of companies privately held by a lot of very—at the time—wealthy individuals. And I’ll tell you,it filed for bankruptcy. That was in a way the best deal I ever made in that I didn’t effect it. That would fill taken everything I had out of Atlantic City. It was one of those certain things that I decided not to go into that everybody had me convinced I should. It would fill cost me hundreds of millions of dollars.”“What made you settle to back out at the final minute?”“Well for one thing, there was something approximately digging holes in the ground that didn’t really interest me. You know, and I was talking to a guy who’s in a very successful electrical-cable business and he passed Trump Tower and he said,‘Donald, the thing that’s dazzling approximately your business is that you can see it. I spend hundreds of millions on cables and I throw it in the ground and no one gets to see it. There’s no gratification. But seek what you fill—you’re artistic, or it’s your building.’ So with this oil—I was talking with the geologists and they were talking approximately different standards of probabilities that there’d be oil under the ground and I said,‘This is ridiculous. It’s a total crapshoot.’ So I didn’t go in on it. whether I’d made that deal we probably wouldn’t be talking nowadays, unless you were here to ask me, and ‘How did you blow it all,where did you go wrong?’ ”But the thrills and perils of deal making no longer fill the same excitement for Trump these days. Not compared with The Subject.“Nothing things as much to me now,” Trump says.
He’s been “spending so much time on this other thing, and ” he says,meaning The Subject, that he’s hardly had time to deem of conventional deals. Because he’s on the track of a much bigger kind of deal, or his final Deal. The Trump Plan.
Of course,he doesn’t call it the Trump Plan. And he denies that he wants to be the one to effect the deal. But he’s convinced there’s a deal there to be made, that it’s now or never, or that the people down in Washington are not doing anything to rep the deal done.
Why don’t they fill the sense of urgency you feel? I ask Trump.
In part,it’s the Qaddafi’s Pilot Factor, he says.“Those people deem that because we fill it and the Russians fill it, or nobody will ever spend it because they’re assuming everybody’s not necessarily mad. They don’t see Qaddafi walking into an airplane and slapping his subordinates and screaming like a madman on the airplane to the pilots. The man is a psycho.“I mean,what whether he’s got the bomb and something happens like the time we shot down two of his planes. And he’s enraged and he can’t see straight and he’s got twenty missiles pointed proper at the United States. Washington. I mean, enact you deem there’s a chance he won’t press the button?”“And then there’s the briefcase bomb.”“Carry it in your briefcase, or proper. I’m not even talking approximately airplanes and missiles. You’ll walk in with your damn tape recorder,” he says, pointing to my harmless Sony, and “and you’ll say it’s a tape recorder and nobody will be able to tell the difference. I mean,that’s where it’s going to be in 20 years.”But what makes him deem he can enact anything to forestall the wild-card nuke horror he envisions?“I don’t deem I fill to be the one. I’m not saying this to promote myself. But it has to be somebody of only a few people. Somebody who has the ability to effect a deal. Because there’s a deal there to be done absolutely. But not by the present players,” he says, and referring to current American negotiators and Reagan negotiators. “They fill no smiles,no warmth; there’s no sense of them as people. Who the hell wants to talk to them? They don’t fill the ability to go into a room and sell a deal. They’re not sellers in the positive sense.”So what is the deal Trump thinks can be done? What is the Trump Plan?It’s a deal with the Soviets. We approach them on this basis: We both recognize the nonproliferation treaty’s not working, that half a dozen countries are on the brink of getting a bomb. Which can only cause wretchedness for the two of us. The deterrence of mutual assured destruction that prevents the United States and the USSR from nuking each other won’t work on the level of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange. Or a madman dictator with a briefcase-bomb team. The only retort is for the grand Two to effect a deal now to step in and prevent the next generation of nations approximately 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, and ” Trump says. Between those two nations you fill the power to dominate any of those countries. So we should spend our power of economic retaliation and they spend their powers of retaliation and between the two of us we will prevent the problem from happening. It would fill been better having done something five years ago,” he says. “But I believe even a country such as Pakistan would fill to enact something now. Five years from now they’ll laugh.”“You deem Pakistan would just fold? We wouldn’t fill to offer them anything in return?”“possibly we should offer them 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 rep rid of it.’ whether that doesn’t work you then start cutting off aid. And more aid and then more. You enact whatever is necessary so these people will fill riots in the street, or so they can’t rep water. So they can’t rep Band-Aids,so they can’t rep food. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to enact it—the people, the riots.”“But what approximately the French?” I ask Trump. “They—”“Id come down on them so tough, and ” he says. “Because I deem they’ve been the worst example of—”“But they already fill the bomb. enact you deem they’ll give it up?”“Well,I tell you whether they didn’t give it up—”“seek, they blew up the Greenpeace ship—”“They’ve got the bomb, or but they don’t fill it now with the delivery capability they will fill in five years. I f they didn’t give it up—and I don’t mean reduce it,and I don’t mean stop, because stopping doesn’t mean anything. I mean rep it out. whether they didn’t, or I would bring sanctions against that country that would be so strong,so unbelievable... ”OK, I didn’t say the Trump Plan was a sophisticated diplomatic document. It’s a little crude at this point. It’s a vision of a deal. It doesn’t fill the imprimatur of the military geniuses who came up with Dense Pack. deem of it as a kind of Modest Proposal.
That’s why I feel protective approximately Trump. It’s not that deem he’s got the solution, or but I like the visionary urgency he brings to the problem. I like the fact that he’s using his Washington contacts,the access his money buys him, to bug the torpid Reaganauts to enact something rational in the nuclear realm.
Trump drops enough names, or off the record,to convince me he does fill high-level contacts, that he may indeed be “dealing at a very high level on this.”I don’t know how seriously they take him there, or I rep a sense that he’s probably—to his credit—made a pest of himself,that the D.
C. people probably regard Trump’s calls on The Subject with the same enthusiasm as the guests at the wedding feast regarded the prospect of listening to the Ancient Mariner’s tale. Remember the way Coleridge’s glittering-eyed stranger began buttonholing the guests at the feast to tell them of the vision of horror he’d beheld out there in the watery wasteland, the hellish encounter with the albatross that haunted him still.
Trump is a bit like the Ancient Mariner here at “21.” In the midst of the manic chatter of feasting deal makers, and he’s haunted by the vision of a madman in the desert wasteland,the vision of Qaddafi’s pilot.
Hey, Donald! I want a part of that deal!That kind of deal doesn’t seem to gratify him the way it once did. He’s looking for a deal of a different sort. The vision of Qaddafi’s pilot has made Trump a stranger at the feast.
Source: slate.com