For months, billionaire Republican front-runner Donald Trump has been separating himself from the Bush administration and much of the GOP presidential hopeful pack by saying that he was against invading Iraq in March of 2003.
Now, BuzzFeed has unearthed audio of Trump on the Howard Stern Show talking during the lead-up to the invasion. On the first anniversary of 9/11, Trump was asked whether he was in favor of invasion, then advocated by hawks in both parties.
And in a major find that has been characterized as a “gotcha” or a smoking gun, Trump said…
“Yeah, I guess so.”
He quickly added, “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
The “first time” was a reference to the Gulf War in 1991, which saw the U.S. and a genuine coalition of nations expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait but stop at the Iraq border and leave it to internal dissention and sanctions to finish Saddam Hussein off.
Those things may have weakened Hussein’s grip on power, yet more than a decade later he was still in charge. America was again making the case before the U.N. for action against Iraq and getting ready to send more troops back into the area over fears of weapons of mass destruction.
Those fears, we now know, would fail to pan out, leaving much egg on the face of the U.S. government.
And Trump’s response to the invasion seems to have been not prescient but in line with a great number of New Yorkers: a bit shellshocked, uncertain of the state of the world post-9/11, wary of going to war but not wanting to get caught by surprise ever again.
That didn’t make Trump a cheerleader for the Iraq war. He has insisted that he was against it and said so publicly beforehand.
That may turn out to be case, but according to Washington Examiner sister site Red Alert Politics’ Ryan James Girdusky, it “doesn’t matter that Trump was for the war in 2002.”
Rather, as Girdusky tweeted Thursday, “it matters that he was against it quickly after and against new wars today.”
We’ll see if voters in South Carolina agree with that assessment Saturday.
