Let me be abundantly clear on my position: Donald Trump is a childish fool and I am embarrassed for my country on the world stage right now. I am desperately searching for some kind of silver lining and not coming up with much. One thing is that he has made some statements over the years suggesting he understands the need for nuclear arms control. Now, with all the verbal diarrhea that comes out of the man’s mouth, we have to always focus mostly on his actions rather than his words. But here are a few points:

• New Start treaty – In 2020, Trump oversaw mostly successful negotiations to extend this treaty with Russia. It was provisionally extended for a year, and the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and agreed with Russia to extend it for five years. It’s one of the ironies of political polarization that opposing sides are sometimes willing to compromise and cooperate as long as there is not too much publicity about it.
• Iran nuclear treaty – Here Trump dealt a massive blow to global non-proliferation goals. Whatever his instincts, I assume Israeli pressure played a big role here.
• Here are some weird statements Trump made in the September 2024 presidential debate. “But eventually, you know, he’s [Putin’s] got a thing that other people don’t have. He’s got nuclear weapons. They don’t ever talk about that. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that. And eventually uh maybe he’ll use them. Maybe he hasn’t been that threatening. But he does have that. Something we don’t even like to talk about. Nobody likes to talk about it.” Weird, incorrect since obviously most people on earth are going to know that Russia is a nuclear power, and yet it shows that Trump is legitimately concerned about the risk of nuclear war.
• From The Intercept: “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many… You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
• And also: “I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military. … I’m going to say we can spend this on other things… I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that.”

Seeing is believing, Senor Trumpez, and we will all see if these encouraging words lead anywhere.