GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump opened what was supposed to be an education policy speech in Cleveland on Thursday afternoon with a drawn-out defense of his decidedly false claim that he’d always been “totally against the war in Iraq.”
“I opposed going in — and I did oppose it, despite the media saying ‘no, yes, no’ — I opposed going in, and I opposed the reckless way Hillary Clinton took us out … letting ISIS fill that big, terrible void,” Trump said, apparently responding to critics who argued that he expressed indifference to a U.S. invasion of Iraq in a 2002 interview with Howard Stern.
“I was opposed to the war from the beginning, long after my interview with Howard Stern,” he continued, citing a TV interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that aired “three months before the war started,” in which Trump said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it yet and that … the economy is a much bigger problem as far as the president is concerned. This was before the war started, by a very short distance.”
Trump then read his own quote from a 2004 Esquire cover story, the earliest — albeit retrospective — proof he’d opposed the Iraq War: “I would never have handled it that way.”
