If you think trump and Russia is new, think again. Trump's inclination toward that part of the world is prefigured in his marital history. Today in an early morning story, Hollywood Reporter says that Trump spilled his dreams of a Russian conquest to a Nobel winner from Boston named Bernard Lown. Lown says a good deal in what appears to be his remarks to the Hollywood Reporter.
Old news
What is reported is, in fact, old news, but it has been ignored of late. The portrait of Trump that emerges is of a grandiose sort who has hopes of achieving an end to the cold war.
If one absorbed the media coverage of the time, the mid-1980s, Trump would emerge as a peacenik. Nothing wrong with that. It just seems dated now that he is a president operating on the same ideological wavelength as his chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Donald Trump Angled for Soviet Posting in 1980s, Says Nobel Prize Winner (Exclusive) https://t.co/xI8vQhM6Tl via @thr
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) May 26, 2017
"He already had Russia mania in 1986, 31 years ago," according to the 95-year-old Lown who invented the defibrillator and shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with a top Soviet physician. The award was for their work to bring about denuclearization. Lown was born in Lithuania. Trump sought him out and Lown traveled from Boston to Trump Tower, thinking Trump might be a source of support for his medical work.
The meeting was awkward.
Ronnie
Finally, Lown asked Trump what his interest was, and he answered, "I intend to call my good friend Ronnie," meaning Reagan, "to make me a plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev...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.
'Who is this self-inflated individual? Is he sane or what?'"
True?
Comments appended to the Hollywood Reporter story wondered if it was true. It will no doubt make waves and it seems consistent with Trump at that time. There is ample documentation of Trump's past interest in lowering the risk of nuclear war. The ambient nature of his mind can be easily perceived by looking at now.
He talks more nukes. He hints more wars. He is careless about more allies. This is not a peacenik profile.
Mixed motives
The only takeaway from all this may be that Trump has a mix of motives, reasons, and actions that are completely contradictory. When he indicates to interviewers that he likes to keep people guessing, the fact is that he cannot help it. He does not know what he thinks until he is acting under the influence of the last big idea. The last big idea he probably heard was from Steve Bannon. It had to do with Armageddon between white Christians and infidels.
