Donald Trump has said throughout the presidential campaign that he never supported the Iraq War.
But at the NBC Commander-in-Chief Forum Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton told the crowd and viewers to look up a 2002 interview between Donald Trump and Howard Stern when the Republican nominee said he supported the invasion.
Later at the forum, Trump said that was not true and reminded viewers of other interviews where he said he opposed the war.
So did Trump support the war or not?
In the radio interview on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump, “Are you for invading Iraq?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded.
“I wish the first time it was done correctly,” he added, referring to the Gulf War.
Trump acknowledged that interview at a town hall on CNN in February, saying he “could have said that.”
“It was probably the first time anybody asked me that question,” he said. “By the time the war started, I was against the war.”
In an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on March 21, 2003, just a day after the start of the invasion, Trump sounded optimistic about how the actions of the military would impact the stock market.
While he didn’t say specifically if he supported the invasion, he said, “I think Wall Street’s waiting to see what happens, but even before the fact they’re obviously taking it a little bit for granted that it looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint and I think this is really nothing compared to what you’re going to see after the war is over.”
He added that he thought Wall Street would “go up like a rocket.”
“We have a strong and powerful country and let’s hope it all works out,” he said.
A few days later on March 25, 2003, the Washington Post published an article quoting Trump calling the war “a mess.”
“If they keep fighting it the way they did today, they’re going to have a real problem,” he said.
It had been reported on March 23, 2003, that a U.S. missile hit a British jet. Shortly after, the Dow Jones dropped after an initial increase after the invasion.
According to factcheck.org, in an interview on Sept. 11, 2003, Trump said, “It wasn’t a mistake to fight terrorism and fight it hard, and I guess maybe if I had to do it, I would have fought terrorism but not necessarily Iraq.”
In April 2004, in another interview with Stern, Trump said he thinks “Iraq is a terrible mistake.”
“And to think that when we leave, it’s gonna be this nice Democratic country. I mean, gimme a break,” he said.
Since then, Trump seems to have stuck with his opposition of the war, but it’s not entirely true that he opposed it before the invasion.
