Muammar Gaddafi

“He came to the country, and he had to make a deal with me because he needed a place to stay.”

Gaddafi remains a divisive and controversial character today, five years after his death, but Trump apparently didn’t find him all that terrible during his regime. Though the U.S. openly defied Gaddafi’s politics, the dictator was in the country in 2009 for the United Nations General Assembly meeting. Many others slammed their doors in the Libyan leader’s face, but Trump saw that there was money to be made and rented land to Gaddafi for his stay.

Chinese government and Tiananmen Square

 “They put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country right now is perceived as weak.”

Donald Trump said in a 1990 Playboy interview that the Chinese government’s reaction to the student-led protests in 1989 was vicious and horrible but that they ultimately showed strength. He admired the government’s strength in fighting off the protestors and said that our own nation is seen as weak to foreign countries. The incident he’s talking about is the Tiananmen Square protests, in which China shot and killed hundreds to thousands of its own unarmed citizens if they were blocking the military’s path to Tiananmen Square.