Transcription
will be the reasonable leader of Iran. We'll see.
Now people are still talking about what President Trump tweeted. It was aggressive, no doubt about it. Right. That statement was a statement. Go ahead and put that up on the screen for me. "A whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again." That would get my attention. It got my attention here in America.
But again, I, I know he knows what he's doing and there's a name for it, actually, and it's a good thing. Has anybody ever heard of that madman theory? It's been a thing in foreign policy for a long time. When a country or a country's leader makes their leader look irrational and volatile, so other world leaders would avoid provoking the country, fearing an unpredictable response.
See, this is one of the many reasons the Russians, in 2016, they actually were rooting for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. That's in the intelligence. Donald Trump, they didn't know what to expect. Hillary Clinton, they had a dossier 18ft long. They know everything about her. They kept an eye on her for a very long time.
But this madman theory is a thing in foreign policy. And scholars and other presidents have talked about it and have done it. Nixon called it the madman theory, the idea that he would pretend that he hated communists so much that he would get angry and he would do anything to destroy communism and save South Vietnam. And so it was called the madman theory. So he liked to project this idea that he was mad and he would do anything to end the war.
This led to one event that we're just finding out about now, at least recently, that Nixon ordered a nuclear worldwide alert, and it was secret until just a few years back, when the documents came out. Very interesting, very interesting, actually.
And President Trump knew Richard Nixon. They socialized together several times and sent each other very kind notes, warm notes, interesting notes. Patricia, the wife said, "Donald Trump, that man is going to be president someday." He also studied Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, obviously, I thought he was a great president. The Russians really feared him. You know, they thought he was a cowboy. They didn't. They were terrified of him. And he kind of fed into that a little bit.
So the madman theory, it works. I don't know, was that