Donald Trump is of a generation still scarred by the embassy hostage crisis in 1979 that defined US-Iranian enmity. It was a humiliation he has never forgotten
At the height of the Iranian hostage crisis, with dozens of American citizens held captive inside the US embassy in Tehran, Donald Trump advocated a full-scale invasion of Iran and the seizure of its oil fields.
On October 8, 1980, the 34-year-old real estate developer was being interviewed on television by the New York gossip columnist Rona Barrett when he suddenly swivelled from discussing the decor of his newly built Trump Tower to address the continuing hostage crisis.
Radical Islamist students had stormed the US embassy almost a year earlier. The supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini had refused to free the 52 hostages unless the ousted Shah was returned to Iran for trial.
