In numerous interviews, he urged removal of troops except to ‘protect the oil’ for the United States.
As the U.S. prepared to exit Iraq in 2011, Trump offered conflicting and muddled opinions about America’s role in the country. He incorrectly predicted that Iran would “walk in” and lay claim to Iraq’s oil fields. In multiple interviews and a book, he said nothing about the threat of ISIL-style radicalism that many experts were publicly warning about at the time.
.. On at least once occasion in early 2011, Trump even said he supported a speedy U.S. withdrawal from the country. Asked by CNN’s Piers Morgan in a February 2011 interview what he would do about U.S. troops in Iraq, Trump said he would “get them out real fast.”
.. Instead, Trump fixated on the specific concern that Iran would take control of Iraq’s oil.
“Two minutes after we leave, Iran is going to come in and take the oil,” Trump told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in an April 2011 interview. “You stay and you protect the oil.”
.. One person who did focus on the threat of Islamic terrorism in Iraq after a U.S. troop withdrawal was Hillary Clinton, whom Trump has also described in recent days as a “founder” of ISIL.
.. In his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough,” Trump argued at length that the U.S. should “protect and control the oil fields” of Iraq, which are mostly located in south Iraq, far from the Sunni territories where ISIL has operated.
Trump’s book also argued for establishing a “cost-sharing plan” that would divide Iraq’s billions of dollars in oil revenue and reimburse the U.S. for its expenses from invading and occupying the country. “Call me old school, but I believe in the old warrior’s credo that ‘to the victor go the spoils,'” Trump wrote.
.. Indeed, Trump suggested in his Wall Street Journal interview that oil profits were a reason why he approved of the 2003 invasion of Iraq—which in recent months he has insisted he always opposed, despite evidence to the contrary.
Letting Trump Run Wild Exposes GOP’s Lack of Principles
Then every Democrat in the country — not to mention almost every pundit — will say, “You guys were fine with Trump as the nominee when he was a racist, but now that he’s hurting the whole GOP’s chances, he’s suddenly unacceptable?” And there will be some truth to the accusation.
.. There’s not enough space here to recount in any serious detail all of the self-destructive statements and bizarre rabbit holes he spelunked into — from attacking the parents of Captain Humayun Kahn, a soldier who died serving our country, to “jokingly” inviting the Russians to muck about in our elections, to reviving past controversies about Senator Ted Cruz’s father’s alleged complicity in the Kennedy assassination.
And yet GOP establishment leaders stuck with their man — just as they’d stuck with their man when he threw NATO under the bus, and ridiculed our treaty obligations with Japan, and attacked American-born Judge Gonzalo Curiel for an alleged conflict of interest between his professional duties and his Mexican heritage.
.. GOP leaders contemplated pulling the emergency brake on the Trump Train only when the nominee said he wouldn’t endorse Ryan or senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte. The message was clear: Only his willingness to endanger top Republicans’ reelection was truly unacceptable behavior. Nothing else Trump said or did until then was beyond the pale.
Trump Sees a Monster
Though the candidates themselves made efforts to hide any hurt, Trump’s delay in endorsing them had occasioned cries of dismay from Republican stalwarts, who were aghast that Ryan, in particular, after all that he had done for Trump—including serving as the honorary chair of the Party’s Convention—might have to face an opponent without the benefit of Trump voters and Trump rhetoric. Didn’t Donald owe them that?
.. But as Trump’s policy statements remain outrageous, and his behavior makes his comments about Clinton’s “unhinged” temperament look like a study in projection, balancing that equation demands ever more from G.O.P. politicians. To say that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump requires signing on to a picture of her as a criminal madwoman, and of the political process that produced her nomination as irretrievably corrupted and broken. It leads to diatribes about Benghazi. It means believing in conspiracy theories.
.. A particularly baroque Trumpian line this week was the notion that the election might be stolen from him. The occasion for this was the issuing of court decisions overturning overly restrictive voter-I.D. laws. (Jedediah Purdy has more on that.) In Green Bay, Trump said, “What does that mean? You just keep walking in and voting?” (No.) He added, “So you have to be very careful, very vigilant.” And yet this is also a point where he is in unity with the larger Party, which has long supported measures that are supposedly aimed at insidious attempts to destroy the integrity of the ballot but that serve, really, to suppress the turnout of minority and low-income voters.
.. Trump’s raw material has long been there, in other words—Benghazi, voter fraud, and the perfidy of Clinton were the subjects of fervid nights on Fox News well before this election cycle—but there is less deniability for allegedly respectable Republicans who might want the electoral benefits without the taint... Yet if she wins, by preëmptively questioning the legitimacy of a Clinton Administration they will have made sane governance all the harder.
Trump demanded Obama’s records. But he’s not releasing his own.
Years before he ran for the White House, Trump built his political brand by accusing President Obama of concealing his past. Trump called on Obama to release his college applications, transcripts and other records, asking how such a “terrible student” got into Ivy League schools. The business executive also demanded that Obama release his passport records and, most famously, his birth certificate, declaring in a video released before the 2012 election: “We know very little about our president.”
But Trump has ensured that Americans know relatively little about him.
He has refused to release many of the same documents that he demanded from Obama, including college transcripts and passport records. He has shirked the decades-old tradition of major nominees releasing their tax returns and other documentation to prove their readiness and fitness for office. And he has yet to release records showing why he received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War and whether he has actually donated the millions of dollars he claims to have given to charity.
.. Trump’s approach reflects a calculation that weathering the criticism for withholding documents is more politically palatable than the scrutiny that would come from giving the information to Trump’s opponents and what his campaign sees as an unfair media.
.. According to filings, legal documents and other public records, he paid no federal income taxes for at least five years — 1978, 1979, 1984, 1991 and 1993. Tax analysts say it is possible that Trump has continued to pay little to no income taxes thanks to generous tax deductions, including real estate depreciation.
.. Before he was a candidate, Trump presented himself as a champion of disclosure, particularly when it came to tax returns.
In 2011, he said he would release his filings if Obama released his long-form birth certificate.
.. In 2014, Trump said he would “absolutely” release the returns “if I decide to run for office.” In 2015, he said his disclosure was contingent on finding “out the true story on Hillary’s emails.”
.. In January, Trump said he was almost ready to disclose his “very big . . . very beautiful” returns. But a month later, Trump reversed course, citing ongoing Internal Revenue Service audits of several years of his taxes.
An IRS spokesman said that nothing, including an audit, “prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information.” And President Richard Nixon released his tax records while under audit.