NEW YORK: Over and over again, Donald Trump says he opposed the Iraq War before it started. But no matter how many times the Republican candidate for president says it, the facts are clear: He did not.
There is no evidence Trump expressed opposition to the war before the U.S. invaded. Rather, he offered lukewarm support. He only began to voice doubts about the conflict well after it began in March 2003.
That hasn’t kept Trump from making his opposition a centerpiece of his criticism of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s approach to foreign policy. Clinton voted in favor of the invasion in 2002 while she was a New York senator. It’s a vote she has said was a mistake.
Trump pushes his claim of early disapproval as “one of the biggest differences in this race.”
“I was against the war in Iraq because I said it’s gonna totally destabilize the Middle East, which it has,” Trump said at Wednesday’s nationally televised forum on national security. The next day, he spent several minutes at an education event in Cleveland reiterating his opposition and citing interviews as proof.
“I was opposed to war from the beginning,” Trump said. “I just wanted to set the record straight.”
But those interviews offer no such evidence. When asked for additional proof, Trump’s campaign referred to material from a fact check published by the Washington Post that concluded “there’s no sign that Trump opposed the invasion or was vocal about it prior to the invasion.”
Trump’s first known public comment on the topic came on Sept. 11, 2002, when he was asked whether he supported a potential Iraq invasion in an interview with radio host Howard Stern.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded after a brief hesitation, according to a recording of the interview unearthed by BuzzFeed News.
His next comment came in January 2003 during a Fox News Channel interview with Neil Cavuto. Trump suggested the economy and threats from North Korea posed greater problems for then-President George W. Bush than Iraq, but he did not say he opposed a possible invasion.
In September 2003, he said on MSNBC that he “would have fought terrorism, but not necessarily Iraq.”