A off-hand remark Donald Trump reportedly made to Ricardo Rosselló set off alarms with the former governor of Puerto Rico, he has written in a memoir due out next week.
According to a report from New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid, in Rosselló’s book “The Reformer’s Dilemma,” obtained by The Hill, the former lawmaker recalls traveling with Trump in a helicopter as they surveyed the island after Hurricane Maria slammed into it in 2017 when Trump decided to wax philosophically.
As detailed in the book, Trump reportedly commented, “Nature has a way of coming back,” before adding, “Well, it does until it does not. Who knows with nuclear warfare what will happen…”
Rosselló continued, “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?” he added.
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The New Republic report added, “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?”
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