Trump wasn't against the Iraq War at the time.
President Donald Trump has revived one of his most significant false claims from the 2016 presidential election: his inaccurate insistence that he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
www.cnn.com
In
his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” Trump argued that a military strike on Iraq might be necessary.
The day after the invasion in March 2003,
Trump told Fox: “It looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint.”
Trump started publicly expressing negative or skeptical thoughts about the war shortly after it began. He called the war a “mess” in
a brief comment at an Academy Awards after-party later in the week of the invasion. Six months into the war, 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.”
Still, Trump did not express definitive opposition in 2003. In a MSNBC appearance in November 2003, he lamented US spending on the war and said that “the question is whether or not we should have been in Iraq in the first place” – but he continued: “I don’t think that this president can do anything about that. He is really – he is on a course that has to stay.”
In December 2003, Trump told Fox that the war had been “tougher than people thought,” but he added, “It just seems to be something that, we are there now, we have to stay, we have to win, otherwise we just won’t have the same respect.”