The presumptive GOP presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump, who refused to return classified government documents — reportedly including U.S. nuclear secrets — that he took from the White House and stored in his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, spoke about nuclear weaponry this week with Fox News star Sean Hannity.
Trump: Nuclear weaponry, weapons so powerful.. I’ve seen the effects pic.twitter.com/SGcXsW4Ba9
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Trump told Hannity: “We’re at the most dangerous point in the history of our country because of the power of weaponry, nuclear weapons in particular. Weapons that are so powerful, that, and I’ve seen the effects, and I had an uncle, a great professor at MIT for many years, we used to talk about nuclear a lot, he understood nuclear very well.”
For years Trump has referred to his late uncle, John George Trump, who was a professor at MIT from 1936 to 1973, and was known for developing rotational radiation therapy. During a 2016 campaign rally, Donald Trump said: “Dr. John Trump at MIT, good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart.”
He also said in a past interview: “My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear.” It was assumed by The New Yorker that perhaps Trump was referring to “the development of hydrogen bombs, rather than basic atomic bombs (which occurred when Donald was about six years old).”
Nuclear weaponry plays an increasingly large role international diplomacy and global order, as nine countries are now known to possess nuclear weapons, including autocracies like North Korea. After he was elected President of the United States, Donald Trump was called a “mentally deranged dotard” by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who threatened to test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean in 2017.
Trump responded to the insult in a speech at the United Nations by threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea if the U.S. were “forced to defend itself.”
As POTUS, Trump eventually met with Kim Jong Un three times (once in 2018, twice in 2019) but made no progress on denuclearization. Media outlets including Bloomberg News reported in December 2020 that “Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons got more dangerous under Trump.”