Trump Has a Path to Mount Rushmore

But only if he achieves total global nuclear disarmament. Nothing less will do. ("Buying Greenland" will not get you there, Mr. President!)

President Donald Trump says he wants to work with Russia on nuclear weapons disarmament. He might even be talking about abolition — getting rid of all nuclear weapons, everywhere. It’s not clear he’s decided himself yet what he means with his call for “denuclearization”.

The Russians are on board. “We are keen to begin this negotiation process as soon as possible,” says the Kremlin spokesman, and suggests involving Britain and France. Trump says China wants in, too, so that’s five of the nine known nuclear-armed nations with tentative invitations to a major disarmament talk.

From the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation

“[Russian President Vladimir Putin and I] were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along,” Trump said last week, describing his first term, in an internationally broadcast speech (video here, full transcript here). “And I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow.”

“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear. And the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today because you don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing. So, we want to see if we can denuclearize.”

Abolishing nuclear weapons — that’s Rushmore-worthy work

Trigger warning: I am now going to discuss possibly carving a 60-foot-tall representation of Donald Trump’s face into a granite cliff in South Dakota. I discuss this as an old school lefty-liberal who has never cast a vote for Donald Trump, not that this would be anyone’s business. (I voted in the last election for a sweet and kind physician-peacenik named Jill Stein.) Also, the National Park Service hints that Mount Rushmore might collapse if we try to put another face on it.

Donald Trump, if he abolishes nuclear weapons, would fit nicely next to Lincoln, who abolished slavery.

It took about 400 workers some 14 years to carve into Mount Rushmore the likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. The lead sculptor chose these four as representing the nation’s birth, growth, development and preservation. Work began in 1927 — which means that in two years, Trump will oversee a Rushmore centennial. His brain is going to be on fire about this for the next two years. Already during his first term, Trump told the governor of South Dakota that seeing his own face up there was his “dream.” His White House even queried the process for adding a face to Rushmore.

There is no process for that, though. The National Park Service has successfully fought off every attempt to alter the sculpture, including proposals to add Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. There’s a campaign underway now to put Obama up there. (Obama’s only known comment about this idea is that he thinks his ears are too big.) The push to carve Reagan’s face into the rock next to Abraham Lincoln’s was quite serious, and in 1999 was debated in Congress.

Poster from the campaign to add Reagan to the monument.

Brief digression: My father usually reads my articles, and I’m a little worried about what the sight of back-to-back depictions of first Trump and then Reagan enshrined on Mount Rushmore might have done to his system. Dad, if you’re reading: Take some deep breaths, maybe put your head down, get a cold compress on the back of the neck. It’ll be OK.

Meanwhile, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just a few months ago made a pitch for Joe Biden. “Such a consequential president of the United States,” Pelosi solemnly told CBS journalist Lesley Stahl, “a Mount Rushmore kind of president.” Stahl laughed in her face. “Are you really saying that he belongs up there on Mount Rushmore?” While Pelosi sputtered, Stahl continued, grinning at the absurdity of it: “Lincoln — and Joe Biden?”

Trump, however, isn’t laughing. He’s sure he can cut a deal to get his likeness next to Lincoln’s. He really wants this. His media allies are already publicly calling for it, and this weekend a Florida Congresswoman announced she would introduce legislation demanding it.

So, this is coming, friends.

Kristi Noem, the former governor of South Dakota who Trump told of his dream to achieve Rushmore, last year published a memoir about ranching and farming. She recounts going on an insane killing spree, gunning down her dog Cricket and then, noticing a nearby goat that had annoyed her in past, impulsively deciding to kill it, too. Cricket was 14 months old — so, a puppy. Killing puppies and then bragging about it would usually disqualify one for high political office. But Noem also had the good sense to gift Trump a 4-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included Trump’s face. Now she’s our new Secretary for Homeland Security.

Again, Trump’s bid for Rushmore is coming. He knows Jefferson was included by Rushmore’s kooky and unsavory sculptor to salute our third president’s role in America’s “growth” — essentially, for the Louisiana Purchase. Why else do you think Trump is talking about Greenland? This is his wheelhouse: a big real estate deal!

I guarantee that Trump thinks buying Greenland earns him Rushmore.

I say it doesn’t. But We the People need to get organized, fast. We may not have realized it yet, but the nation has entered into a negotiation with our new president over the price of putting his face on Mount Rushmore. Everything has a price — the price of a historic alteration (desecration?) of a renowned national monument has to be a world history-making achievement. If Trump follows through on his recent call for “denuclearization” and succeeds in saving the world from an eventual-inevitable nuclear war — then maybe his face on Rushmore would be a fair trade.

The good news is: Long before Trump dreamt of his face on Mount Rushmore, he dreamt of being the man to walk us back from the nuclear brink.

Trump’s interest in nuclear abolition is sincere and long-standing.

There are interviews going back decades in which The Donald, then an infamously pushy and boorish real estate developer, would himself bring up the urgent need for nuclear disarmament. It’s not that he’d be asked about it — the interviewers wanted to talk about other things. But nuclear war was constantly on young Trump’s mind. In a long 1990 interview with Playboy Magazine, he sounded like the spokesman for an anti-nuclear peace group:

“I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war. It’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because ‘everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses [the] weapons’. What bullshit.”

Trump was right then, and he’s right today. The looming, ever-present danger of nuclear war is indeed the biggest problem this world has. It is indeed a little like a sickness that people are in denial about. It is indeed the greatest of all stupidities to assume weapons poised on hair-trigger alert for launch within minutes magically won’t ever be used. It is indeed such bullshit.

In fact, Trump’s 35-year-old comments echo those of my colleagues at Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War. That’s perhaps not surprising — Trump had been doing his homework. Five years before he sat down for that Playboy interview, Trump had invited Bernard Lown, a Boston cardiologist and one of the founders of PSR and IPPNW, to a meeting at Trump Towers. Trump wanted to talk about nuclear disarmament; Lown obliged because he hoped to wangle a donation to a cardiology institute.

Trump told Lown, “I’m going to call Ronnie” (meaning President Ronald Reagan) and ask to be put in charge of arms control talks with the Soviet Union. In an interview about this decades later, Lown (then in his mid-90s), remembered the young real estate developer as “pretentious” and “inattentive,” and he mockingly quoted Trump as boasting that if he ever gets to lead our negotiations with the Russians, “It’ll take one hour of discussion before the Cold War is over.”

Lown dismissed this as “idiocy.” I actually disagree. It’s not idiocy. It’s a statement of pragmatic optimism; Trump’s colorful way of saying the deal on the table would be a tremendous win-win for all sides. What’s more, Lown called Trump “inattentive,” but it sounds to me like Trump was paying pretty close attention: Years later, to Playboy, he faithfully recites PSR’s oft-cited analogy that nuclear weapons are akin to a preventable-yet-fatal sickness we are all in denial over.

Many snarky profiles of Trump from the 1980s are unintentionally and revealingly poignant today. The interviewers want to talk about his wealth, his glitz, his antics — because that’s the only thing they’re interested in. Trump wants to talk about himself, too, because certainly Donald Trump loves himself some Donald Trump. But even callow and shallow Trump is a deeper soul than his journalistic tormentors. Trump repeatedly brings up the same existential question of nuclear weapons that bothers so many of us today (and he gets relentlessly ridiculed for doing so).

For example, a New York Times profile from 1985 — 40 years ago! — focuses on Trump’s then-newsy purchase of a U.S. Football League franchise, his opulent Trump Tower property with its piano and violin players in the lobby, and so on. Winding down toward the end of the article, we come to this:

The football thing is cute, Trump Tower and the piano and all of that, it’s all cute, but what does it mean? he says, sounding what borders on a note of uncharacteristic despair.

Asked to explain, he adds: What does it all mean when some wacko over in Syria can end the world with nuclear weapons?

He says that his concern for nuclear holocaust … has been troubling him since his uncle, a nuclear physicist, began talking to him about it 15 years ago.

His greatest dream is to personally do something about the problem and, characteristically, Donald Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements … The idea that he would ever be allowed to go into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried.

Well, that hasn’t aged well.

In an earlier interview, in 1984 with The Washington Post, Trump had also described his formal lobbying effort to be put in charge of all nuclear disarmament talks. Again, this is Trump at age 38, worth hundreds of millions of dollars and utterly full of himself.

He and The Post reporter meet at a fancy Manhattan restaurant and instantly get a table, “the one in the corner with a view of the park and Fifth Avenue,” and the reporter, with a mix of admiration and condescension, describes young Trump. He is brassy, “the master of grand plans,” “classic nouveau riche,” a man with an “oversized ego” and an “insatiable craving for recognition”, with a heavy Queens accent and words “tumbling out as fast as quarters out of a slot machine,” “a fast-talking, fast-walking operator who always has an idea.”

The interview continues:

This morning, Trump has a new idea. He wants to talk about the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets.

He wants to be the negotiator.

He would know what to ask the Russians for, he says. … “It’s something that somebody should do that knows how to negotiate and not the kind of representatives that I have seen in the past.”

He could learn about missiles quickly, he says.

“It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles … I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation … I’d do it in a second.”

We don’t know if Trump ever called “Ronnie” Reagan, but we do know from Fred Kaplan’s indispensable book about U.S. nuclear weapons policymaking, “The Bomb,” that he was still lobbying for the job in 1988 when George H. W. Bush took over as president. Kaplan reports that “no one took the notion seriously,” and Bush instead nominated a career diplomat, Richard Burt. Not long after, Kaplan recounts, Trump and Burt happened to meet at a Manhattan reception.

Trump introduced himself and offered Burt advice on how to negotiate:

“Arrive late at the first session, he told Burt. Walk up to the main guy on the Russian side of the table, stick your finger in his chest, and say, ‘Fuck you!’ ”

Trump might well fail at this, again

There are reasons to be deeply skeptical that President Trump can earn the immortality of his face enshrined on Mount Rushmore.

His first term was a dud. As a newbie in Washington, Trump surrounded himself with national security hawks (awful people like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, etc.). He pulled us out of a deal with Iran to curtail that country’s nuclear weapons ambitions, apparently because it had been achieved by his nemesis Obama; he said he’d negotiate a new deal, but then didn’t follow through. He pulled us out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. His approach to negotiating with Kim Jong Un’s North Korea was terrifyingly erratic and ultimately unproductive. When the United Nations voted in 2017 to pass a historic treaty banning nuclear weapons — declaring them to be as illegal and as immoral as chemical and biological weapons — the Trump administration (and every other nuclear-armed power) ignored the vote and the treaty.

But Trump now returns from four years in the political wilderness — and he returns filled with hatred for the neocon national security hawks he once elevated. The national security state is associated with the Russiagate hoax against Trump; the absurd attempt to impeach Trump over a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to look into the Biden family’s openly corrupt dealings there (dealings that President Biden just pardoned his family for on his last days in office); the 2020 influence operation to suppress and even outright censor discussion of the compelling evidence of that Biden family corruption in Ukraine; and, in the minds of many, even with the two assassination attempts against candidate Trump.

Success at nuclear disarmament will mean declaring war on the American national security state itself. Trump is already engaged in that war, if only to revenge himself for being outplayed during his first term. He has also surrounded himself with some better people. His Middle East team is so much better that there is talk of a new Iran nuclear deal. His choice of Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the intelligence community has not yet been confirmed and is being fought against by panicked neocons. Gabbard, like Trump, has been the victim of McCarthyist smears; she is a left-leaning politician, a former Bernie Sanders supporter, and a prominent and eloquent voice warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons.

So, Trump is newly empowered to chart his own course, he has surrounded himself with a new team, and even the crises he inherits — mainly, the Ukraine war — represent opportunities to strike historic bargains.

Peace groups, and really all sensible people, need to tell Trump what we want. We want an end to the endless wars, a draw-down of the overbearing and metastasizing national security police state — and abolition of nuclear weapons. Get us that, Mr. President, and we can talk about a 60-foot tall granite representation of your face smiling down upon us for generations to come.