Joe Scarborough Falsely Claims “You Can't Say” Trump Supported Iraq War And Libya Intervention

Written by Media Matters Staff

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MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough claimed that “you can't say” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “was for the [Iraq] war” and that “You can't say he was for the Libyan invasion” because Trump “was all over the place” on those issues. In fact, Trump clearly stated in 2002 and 2003 before the war started that he supported the invasion of Iraq, and there is no evidence of him opposing the war publicly until 2004. Trump was also consistent in his public support for the Libyan intervention right before and as it occurred in 2011. Scarborough's remarks also contradict his own statement in May that Trump was “very clearly in favor of the Libya invasion.” From the August 24 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe:

WILLIE GEIST (CO-HOST): The core of [Donald Trump's] deportation policy has been effectively touchback amnesty, which means you send everybody out and then the people, even though they broke the law, “the good ones,” as he's saying, get to come back in. A lot of people, conservatives in particular, are against that. Last night Kellyanne Conway was asked about touchback amnesty and she said, “There is no touchback.” Well that's the core of his entire -- so my point is we don't know exactly know what his policy is on immigration. 

JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): That's why [the Hillary Clinton campaign] go[es] with erratic. That's why when you have people writing these articles saying, “Trump was for the war in Iraq,” or “Trump was against the war in Iraq.” Or “Trump was never” -- I just sit there. What are you talking about? He took, he literally took all sides. So you can't say he was for the war. You can't say he was against the war. He was all over the place. It's the same thing with Libya. You can't say he was for the Libyan invasion. He was against the Libyan invasion. He was all over the place. He said he was against it. You've got the Instagram where he's being, he said, “Hey, let's go in. This is going to be easy.” And so I would -- for the Clinton campaign, I understand. It's hard to figure out exactly what his position is. It's the same thing right now with immigration. Where does he stand? Everybody jumped on this softening line. But everything I saw from there last night suggests no change. That's what Kellyanne Conway said last night.