President Donald Trump has wanted to take down Iran since he was a 34-year-old soft-spoken realtor. His first known comment on foreign policy, ever, was in October 1980, when he declared that the clerical regime in Iran—which for a year had been holding 52 hostages—had made the U.S. look “just absolutely and totally ridiculous.”
“I think this country is responsible for that war by its own weaknesses. If we were respected, properly respected, as a country and as a people and as a nation, I don’t think we’d have a war between Iran and Iraq,” Trump told gossip columnist Rona Barrett in an interview on NBC. (In the same interview, Trump also famously declared that he wouldn’t want to be president, because politics “is a mean game.”)
