Trump’s Startling Nuclear Fantasies Revealed in New Book
When Donald Trump traveled to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, he remarked to then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló that the United States “won’t be second” in using nuclear weapons.
The startling admission was revealed in Rosselló’s upcoming book, The Reformer’s Dilemma, due to be released on Tuesday. The Hill received an excerpt from the book, that described how Rosselló and Trump were in a helicopter surveying damage from the hurricane.
“‘Nature has a way of coming back,’ said the president. ‘Well, it does until it does not. Who knows with nuclear warfare what will happen …,’” Rosselló wrote in the book.
“And then, he said the one thing that made me more concerned than anything else in the entire visit. ‘But I tell you what …’ He paused for effect. ‘If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.’ This statement floored me. I could not believe what I was hearing. It was surreal. Was he really talking about total annihilation as we flew over the ravaged sights of the island?” Rosselló wrote.
Rosselló also discussed the infamous paper towel incident, where Trump threw paper towels to victims of the hurricane like he was shooting hoops.
“The image plastered in history was one that demonstrates disdain and repulsion for the people,” he wrote. “Was it dumb and incredibly thoughtless? Yes. The president should have known better. But that does not detract from the true story: The media narrative got carried away, which is happening more often than not in our political culture.”
The nuclear war story is not surprising, as Trump has said a lot of other worrying things about nuclear weapons. During his 2016 campaign, he reportedly asked one of his foreign policy advisers, “Why have them if we can’t use them?” In December 2016, he said, “Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” In the summer of 2017, he also told military leaders he wanted to increase the nuclear stockpile tenfold, back to the peak levels of the Cold War. He even discussed using nukes against North Korea in 2017. And who can forget his idea to nuke hurricanes to stop them from hitting the United States?
Trump has also shared nuclear secrets with random people, including an Australian billionaire visiting his Mar-a-Lago club in April 2021, and bragged to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about “a weapon system that nobody’s ever had in this country before.”
“We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before,” Trump said to Woodward.
With Trump showing signs of cognitive decline, a return to the White House is liable to result in more disturbing ideas about nukes at best, and, at worst, him disastrously even carrying out a nuclear threat.