Years before being elected president, Donald Trump "aggressively pursued" an official government post to the USSR and hoped to negotiate a nuclear arms deal with Mikhail Gorbachev, The Hollywood Reporter says.
"He already had Russia mania in 1986, 31 years ago," Bernard Lown, a cardiologist who invented the defibrillator, told the show-business publication in an interview published Friday.
Lown, who shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with a Soviet doctor for their campaign to promote denuclearization, said the Manhattan real-estate mogul grilled him about Gorbachev, the USSR's head of state, who he'd once met.
"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,'" Lown told The Reporter.
"So I asked, 'Why would you want to know?' And he responded, 'I intend to call my good friend Ronnie [President Ronald 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. 'Who is this self-inflated individual? Is he sane or what?'"
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