Throughout the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump has said that he opposed the Iraq from the beginning, but in 2002, the real estate mogul indicated that he supported the invasion.
In a 2002 interview with Howard Stern surfaced by Buzzfeed News on Thursday, Stern asked Trump if he supported the invasion.
“Yeah I guess so,” Trump responded, according to audio published by Buzzfeed News. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
Trump also discussed whether Iraq had nuclear weapons in a book he wrote in 2000, as Buzzfeed News has highlighted.
“We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons,” Trump then wrote, according to Buzzfeed. “I’m no warmonger. But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion.”
The Republican presidential candidate was confronted about his 2000 comments in an MSNBC town hall on Wednesday night. Co-moderator Joe Scarborough told Trump that “nobody can find” the real estate mogul’s comments from before the U.S. invaded Iraq.
“I’m a real estate person, a business person. Nobody cared about my comments,” Trump said in response, arguing that he vocally opposed the war in 2003. “I’m the only one that said, ‘Don’t go in.'”
On Thursday night, CNN town hall moderator Anderson Cooper asked Trump whether he recalled the comments he made to Stern in 2002.
“No,” Trump responded. “I could have said that. Nobody asked me that. I wasn’t a politician. It was probably the first time anybody has asked me that question.”
“By the time the war started, I was against the war,” Trump added.
