While Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s second son, does not appear to be imitating his father’s tanning techniques, he does appear to be taking on his father’s habit of lying during nationally televised interviews. On Tuesday’s broadcast of CBS “This Morning,” Eric told host Norah O’Donnell that his billionaire father adamantly opposed US military intervention in Libya and Iraq.
“And he spoke about, but that’s not my father, I mean, that’s not my father, but he always talked about, don’t go into Syria, don’t go into Libya, don’t go into Iraq, I mean you’re going to destabilize the Middle East,” said Eric after stumbling through a series of pregnant pauses.
Eric Trump straight up lies on CBS This Morning, saying his father said he opposed Iraq and Libya: h/t @oliverdarcy pic.twitter.com/yfHlFI06BE
— andrew kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) August 2, 2016
We fact-checked his claims about his father’s consistent opposition to the military interventions in Libya and Iraq, and it turns out that Trump actually supported both efforts in the past.
As The Daily Wire reported, “On September 11, 2002 Donald Trump explicitly told radio personality Howard Stern that he supported an invasion of Iraq. President Bush initiated the Iraq War in March of 2003, although his administration had been building his case for the war effort since 2002. In a five-minute phone interview, the real estate mogul was asked bluntly, ‘Are you for invading Iraq?’” Here’s what Trump said:
“Yeah, I guess so.”
It’s the same story with Libya. In fact, Trump was far more enthusiastic about intervention in Libya. BuzzFeed News managed to dig up Trump’s February 2011 blog in which he argued passionately for the United States to topple the Gaddafi regime and mitigate the bloodshed flowing from the Libyan Civil War.
“Now we should go in, we should stop this guy,” Trump said bluntly, referring to former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Here’s the full statement he self-recorded in his video blog:
I can’t believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage.
You talk about things that have happened in history; this could be one of the worst. Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before.
But we have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals. It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped. We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.
At one point Trump even suggests that the Libyans “should pay us back” for liberating the country “after it’s all done.”
After repeatedly lying about his support for both the operations in Iraq and Libya, Trump has seemingly tasked his son with doing the same thing.
Will this make one iota of difference to Trump’s most loyal devotees? Probably not.