Jessica Estepa

USA TODAY

Back in the 1980s and in the middle of the Cold War, Donald Trump believed he was the only one to handle a nuclear disarmament deal, and thus tried to get a government post in the USSR, according to a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

"He already had Russia mania in 1986, 31 years ago," Bernard Lown, inventor of the defibrillator, told The Hollywood Reporter. Lown won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on denuclearization along with Soviet cardiologist Yevgeny Chazov.

Lown, now 95, had met with USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump wanted to learn more about the Soviet head of state, so he spoke with Lown.

Lown told the THR:

"He said to me, 'I hear you met with Gorbachev, and you had a long interview with him, and you're a doctor, so you have a good assessment of who he is.' So I asked, 'Why would you want to know?' And he responded, 'I intend to call my good friend Ronnie,' meaning Reagan, 'to make me a plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev.' Those are the words he used. And he said he would got o Moscow and he'd sit down with Gorbachev, and then he took his thumb and hit the desk and he said, 'And within one hour, the Cold War would be over!' I sat there dumbfounded. 'Who is this self-inflated individual? Is he sane or what?'"

He and Trump never spoke again, he said.

According to THR, the White House did not return a request for comment.

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