'Morning Joe' airs brutal video showing Trump's previous stances on foreign policy compared with now
Donald Trump suggested in a Monday speech that he had been right about the Middle East from the start, but old video and audio clips show that the billionaire has been less than prescient on foreign policy.
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" spliced together footage Tuesday morning to show how the Republican presidential nominee's foreign-policy positions had changed over time.
"I have been an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning," Trump said during his Monday address at Youngstown State University in Ohio.
The "Morning Joe" video then plays a clip from Howard Stern's radio show. Stern asked Trump whether he was for invading Iraq, and Trump responded, "Yeah, I guess so."
Trump also changed positions over time on the troop drawdown in Iraq.
"I have been just as clear in saying what a catastrophic mistake Hillary Clinton and President Obama made with the reckless way in which they pulled out," Trump said in his Monday speech.
But he seemed to support pulling out of Iraq in 2007, at the height of the war.
"You know how they get out? They get out," Trump told CNN that year. "Declare victory and leave."
And despite saying in his Monday speech that Libya was "stable" before the US intervention, he advocated deposing Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
"Libya was stable and President Obama and Hillary Clinton should never have attempted to build a democracy in Libya," Trump said Monday.
Trump also changed his tune on that. In February 2011, Trump said in a video filmed in his office: "Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people. Nobody knows how bad it is. We should go in. We should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick."