The New Yorker:

He once defied the G.O.P. by blasting military interventions. But what looked like anti-interventionism is really a preference for power freed from the pretense of principle.

By Daniel Immerwahr

There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.”

The audience hated this. Trump’s fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.

Trump hadn’t stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”) But by 2004 he truly was opposed. He scoffed at the notion that the war would achieve anything. What was the point of “people coming back with no arms and legs” and “all those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces?” he asked. “All of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.”

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