“Fact Checkers” are all the rage this election cycle.
Liberals have made a cottage industry out of supposedly neutral “fact checkers” who virtually always come down against Republicans.
And nowhere is that more clear than the media’s false assertions that Donald Trump opposed the war in Iraq.
The media picked up this case during the GOP primaries when Trump made his opposition to the war a key selling point of his foreign policy judgment.
Partisan bloggers at liberal media outfits began to worry that in a general election, Trump would have a key advantage over Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war in Iraq in 2002 and defended her vote up until it became apparent she was running for president in 2016.
The thin reed of the media’s case that Trump was lying hinges on a single September, 2002 interview Trump had with radio host Howard Stern.
When asked whether the United States should go to war in Iraq, Trump gave an ambivalent answer of “yeah, I guess so.”
However, months later in January 2003, Trump gave an interview with Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto where he expressed hesitation about the war.
Fox News reports:
“Nearly two months before the Iraq War began on March 20 (sic), in the video, Cavuto asks Trump how much time President Bush should spend on the economy vs. on Iraq.
“Well, I’m starting to think that people are much more focused now on the economy,” Trump said. “They’re getting a little bit tired of hearing ‘We’re going in, we’re not going in.’ Whatever happened to the days of Douglas MacArthur? Either do it or don’t do it.”
Trump continued: “Perhaps he shouldn’t be doing it yet. And perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations.”
By the fall of 2003, Trump was calling the war a mistake and questioning why it was done.
The Washington Post reports:
Sept. 11, 2003: Trump on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country:”
“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.”
November 4, 2003: Trump on “Hardball with Chris Matthews:”
Matthews: “What is the economic impact? Is it the cost factor of about $100 billion a year for the military and the rebuilding, is that the cost, or is it psychological?”
Trump: “Well, I think it’s psychological. It is also tremendous amounts of money being pumped into Iraq. I mean, you look at states like New York and California, where they can’t afford school systems, and we are giving $87 billion to Iraq and that is just the beginning. So, you know, it is a tremendous cost to this country, what’s gone on there, and again, we are getting some very, very unpleasant surprises in Iraq, and hopefully something is going to be done about it quickly.”
The record clearly shows that the first time Trump was asked about the war he gave a very half-hearted statement of support.
The interview with Howard Stern being conducted on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks may have played into his ambivalent statement of  “yeah, I guess so.”
But by January of 2003, Trump was saying the economy was of greater concern than Iraq and maybe President Bush should not be going in.
By the fall of 2003, it was clear he was a critic of the war.
As much as the Clinton fans in the “fact checking” industry want to spin this story to make it about Trump supposedly supporting the war, the evidence does not back that up.