Note to interviewers of Donald Trump: The invasion of Iraq happened in 2003, not 2004. (photo: Arlo K. Abrahamson/US Navy)
Donald Trump has claimed many, many times—on TV, at campaign stops and at candidate debates—that he opposed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in real time. “You know, I was the one, and I said it very strongly, and you know this, and it was reported by everybody, because unfortunately I get a disproportionate amount of publicity,” Trump told CNN‘s Chris Cuomo (10/6/15). At the September debate (9/18/15), he said he could point to “25 different stories” about him being against the war before it started.
Funny, then, that when Huffington Post‘s Michael Calderone (10/6/15) looked into it, he couldn’t find any. Trump’s go-to evidence of his being the only GOP candidate who, in his words, “had the vision” to say the war was a bad idea is a Reuters piece from July 2004, and while some folks pointed out during the debate that that was 16 months after the war began, Calderone notes that TV interviewers, like Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd (10/4/15), have been too delicate, or something, to point that out.
CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (7/22/15), for example, had no questions about Trump’s statement, “In 2004, I was totally against going in,” and factcheckers at USA Today (9/8/15) raised no eyebrows at the op-ed in which he wrote, “I was against the war from the very beginning, all the way back in 2004.” “I didn’t want to go into Iraq in 2004 and we went there,” he told Joe Scarborough (MSNBC, 8/10/15). And so on.
It’s not that Trump is wrong that the Iraq War was a disaster; and he was quoted calling it a “mess” about a week after it started. But to let slide, again and again, his reference to comments in July 2004—at which point even the New Republic opposed the war—is just a press fail.
Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and the host of CounterSpin.
