Donald Trump's decades-long obsession with being president

It's been going on since the '80s

Donald Trump does not want America to be pushed around.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

In October 1980, in his first major interview on network TV, Donald Trump sat on a couch in his Fifth Avenue apartment discussing the tough decisions he had made as a builder. (Rona Barrett Looks at Today's Super Rich would air the following year.) Then the 34-year-old abruptly turned the casual interview into something more controversial: a lecture on the lack of leadership in the U.S.

Gas prices were soaring, and inflation was rampant. More than four dozen Americans who had been kidnapped from the U.S. Embassy in Iran were being held hostage while, according to Trump, "we just sit back and take everybody's abuse.... I just don't feel the country is going forward in the proper direction."

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