Donald Trump with President Ronald Reagan in the White House on March 11, 1987 (White House Photographer/Wikimedia Commons)
Back in 1987 — the year "The Art of the Deal" came out — Donald Trump sat down for an interview with the late ABC News journalist Barbara Walters. Trump, now 79, was in his early forties at the time, and his first presidential run (a short-lived Reform Party campaign in 2000) was 13 years away. But Trump had a lot to say about politics, including foreign policy. And according to Salon's Heather Digby Parton, Trump revealed, during that interview almost 40 years ago, what he had in mind for Iran.
"Much has been said over the past few weeks about what motivated Donald Trump to go to war with Iran," Parton explains in an article published on April 7. "Since he has given more than half a dozen different explanations, and sometimes in the same day, there's no way of knowing for sure…. He has also thrown in his lot with Israel and certain Gulf states for ideological and financial reasons. In the case of Israel, there are also theological considerations at play. But Trump has another motive that he's never tried to hide. In fact, he's been saying it explicitly for the better part of 40 years: 'We should take the oil.'"
Trump is now calling for the United States to help itself to Iran's oil, which Parton notes, he proposed during the Walters interview 39 years ago.
"Trump himself has been circulating a 1987 interview he did with Barbara Walters," Parton observes. "He had given a speech before a rotary club in New Hampshire in which he posed the question, 'Why couldn't we go in and take over some of (Iran's) oil?' When Walters asked how he thought such a thing could be done — 'Would you send in the Marines, start a war?' — he replied, 'Let 'em have Iran, you take their oil.' And when she pressed him further, he made a recommendation. 'The next time Iran attacks this country, go in and grab one of their big oil installations and keep it.'"
Parton adds, "He offered the same argument during an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley in 2011."
Trump, the Salon journalist observes, is keeping his eye on other oil-producing countries as well, including Syria and Venezuela.
"His threats to annex Canada and Mexico are at least partially informed by the fact that they are oil-rich nations as well," Parton writes. "Interestingly, he has not been quite as aggressive about seizing the fields of oil powerhouses Russia and Saudi Arabia…. 'Just take the oil' was an insane idea to begin with, and it's why you don't make that guy at the end of the bar the president of the most powerful country in the world. And maybe it's also why the media shouldn't elevate loud-mouthed hype artists like Trump in the first place."