1990 Donald Trump Playboy interview: Some presidents were ‘incredible jerk-offs’
By Carlos Frías - Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Posted: 2:43 p.m. Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Donald Trump supposedly hadn’t slept for 48 straight hours when he sat down for an interview with Playboy in March of 1990 and allowed himself to imagine himself a world leader.
“If I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican — and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m a conservative,” he told interviewer Glenn Plaskin. “But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows ….”
“I’d do the job as well as or better than anyone else.”
Trump was 43 then, propped behind his cinnamon-colored Brazilian rosewood desk atop Trump Tower, stopping to take calls from everyone from Miami Vice actor Don Johnson (asking to borrow his yacht) to the Duchess of York (asking to borrow his helicopter).
“I don’t want to be president. I’m one hundred percent sure. I’d change my mind only if I saw this country continue to go down the tubes.”
Even then, Trump was already tipping his hand about the kind of leaders he admired and what kind of leader he would be.
“Some of our presidents have been incredible jerk-offs,” he told the interviewer. “We need to be tough.”
Trump, who has praised the authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin and r etweeted quotes from Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, praised the way China’s leaders put down student protests at Tiananmen Square just two years earlier.
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of he world …”
Trump had by then already visited Russia to consider building luxury hotels in Moscow. And he criticized then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who would help bring about the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
“I was very unimpressed …. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”
In regards to foreign relations, he balked at the idea of negotiating with Shia radicals to rescue more than 100 hostages, most of them American and European, taken over a period of 10 years in the 1980s.
“Number one, in almost all cases, the hostages were told by our government not to be there. If a man decides to become a professor at Beirut University, when he was told not to be there, and that person is captured …. You feel badly for him but you cannot base your foreign policy on his capture …. Weakness always causes problems.”
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