The list of shocking memory lapses by Donald Trump about his past positions on several issues grew a little longer last night when he responded to a charge by Ted Cruz that he supported the war in Libya.
[Ted Cruz] said I was in favor of Libya? I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya? We would be so much better off if Gaddafi were in charge right now. If these politicians went to the beach and didn’t do a thing and we had Saddam Hussein and we had Gaddafi in charge, instead of having terrorism all over the place, we’d be—at least they killed terrorists, all right?
And I’m not saying they were good because they were bad. They were really bad. But we don’t know what we’re getting. You look at Libya right now, ISIS, as we speak, is taking over their oil, as we speak. It’s a total mess. We would’ve been better off if the politicians took a day off instead of going into war.
Oh, really? Here’s Donald Trump from four years ago:
“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” said Trump on his video blog. “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.”
Trump said Libya could end up one of the worst massacres in history, and it would be very easy to topple Qaddafi.
“You talk about things that have happened in history; this could be one of the worst,” he said. “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.”
Trump said the people would take over from Qaddafi eventually and then “they should pay us back” out of appreciation.
“But we have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals,” he said. “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.”
“After it’s all done,” Trump said, the protesters who took over the country would reimburse the U.S. through oil.
Does Trump really have a faulty memory? Perhaps he’s suffering from dementia.
More likely, he’s simply a chronic liar who switches his positions whenever it suits his purposes. There isn’t a major issue on which he hasn’t altered his position — sometimes by 180 degrees. And when challenged on the lie, he usually doubles down and denies he said any such thing, even when a transcript or a video easily shows him to be a liar.
It’s impossible to call him out for all his lies because there are just too many of them. But maybe we’re making too much of this. After all, after eight years of Obama, we should have gotten used to being lied to.
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