Fox News is scrambling to explain why host Neil Cavuto appears to have changed his tune on whether he believes Donald Trump was against the war in Iraq when Cavuto interviewed him in 2003.
In a segment taped back in February, the host of “Your World With Neil Cavuto” claimed that he did not get the impression from the interview, conducted roughly two months before the war began, that Trump opposed the invasion of Iraq.
“Donald Trump has been campaigning largely on the theme: ‘I saw the ills and woes of going into Iraq before anyone else,'” Cavuto said. “Yet when I interviewed him back in January of 2003, a couple of months before we formally got involved in Iraq, he could have left you with a different impression.”
But on Monday night, after the first presidential debate between Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Cavuto introduced a clip from the 2003 interview — which has been used recently by Trump’s supporters to prove that he opposed the Iraq War — and appeared to sing a different tune.
“It is very unfair for those in the mainstream media to say that he never had any reservations before we went into that war,” he said on Fox Business Network. “In fact, he did.”
The discrepancy in Cavuto’s recollections was discovered when Fox News released a clip of the interview via Twitter on Tuesday, accompanied by the plea “WATCH: 2003 clip backs up @realDonaldTrump on Iraq War opposition.”
In the 2003 interview, Trump said to Cavuto of President George W. Bush, “Well, he has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps he shouldn’t be doing it yet and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations, you know?”
Trump continued: “[Bush is] under a lot of pressure. I think he’s doing a very good job. But, of course, if you look at the polls, a lot of people are getting a little tired. I think the Iraqi situation is a problem. And I think the economy is a much bigger problem.”
While the comment does express skepticism about the invasion, many in the media have noted that it does not indicate opposition. The use of the word “yet” also suggests Trump may have had an issue with the timing rather than the invasion itself.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning folks at PolitiFact weighed in the matter saying, “So Trump put the economy ahead of confronting Iraq, but he didn’t speak against going to war. At most he suggested waiting for the United Nations to do something.”
Media watchdog Media Matters called the Fox maneuver a “sham,” while media blog Mediate went a step further, calling it “bulls-t.”
When TheWrap reached out to Fox News seeking an explanation for Cavuto’s seeming flip-flop, a rep for the network simply referred us to Monday night’s video but did not elaborate further.
9 More Donald Trump Fudges and Lies From Primary Season (Videos)
Donald Trump seems to be on an unstoppable charge to the Republican presidential nomination, even though there's been a plethora of news reports challenging various claims he has made in the past two months alone. Here are some of his greatest hits.
During the CNN South Carolina town hall debate, Anderson Cooper asked Trump about a interview posted on Buzzfeed in which Trump voiced support of the Iraq invasion. Trump responded by saying that he opposed the Iraq invasion by the time it started, but Buzzfeed countered with a clip from another taken the weekend after the invasion started, in which he said the invasion looked like "a tremendous success."
On Jan. 29, Trump said that he "never once asked" for Fox News' Megyn Kelly to be removed as a moderator for a debate that he boycotted. While Trump didn't directly request the removal, he did question Kelly's qualifications. On Jan. 23, he tweeted: "Based on @MegynKelly's conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate."
During his New Hampshire victory speech, Trump claimed the unemployment rate of 5 percent was false, and was actually somewhere between 28-42 percent (fast forward to 12:00). While the unemployment rate most commonly reported does not count people who are not actively seeking jobs, there is another which includes more people attached to the labor force. Under this, the unemployment rate only rises to 10 percent.
Another claim from the N.H. victory speech is that Trump is the only candidate who self-funds his campaign. A check of documents from the Federal Election Commission shows that as of the end of 2015, Trump had put in nearly $2 million to his campaign, but he had received just over $6.5 million from donors.
During a Jan. 20 town hall in Iowa, Trump said that he could make Mexico pay for a border-spanning wall by using the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico to cover the cost. Politifact debunked it, citing several economic experts who noted that the trade deficit is based largely on private trading, and that Mexico's trade surplus does not mean that they have the resources to fund such a wall.
This attack ad against Ted Cruz that aired in South Carolina this past month is one of many examples of Trump claiming that illegal immigrants are "pouring in." The hyperbole ignores a 2015 Pew Research study that shows that the illegal immigrant population in America has actually declined by about 1 million since the start of the recession.
At a rally on Feb. 19, Trump claimed that General John Pershing captured 50 Muslim terrorists in the 1920s and executed them via firing squad with bullets dipped in pigs' blood. The truth is that while Pershing fought against Muslim swordsmen in the Philippines to stop the massacre of Christians, he only sprinkled them with pigs' blood -- which they considered to be unholy -- to strike fear. He never ordered such an execution.
Trump continues to insist that torture techniques like waterboarding work. He does this despite the fact that just two years ago, a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques made headlines when it called them "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees."
In a Jan. 14 debate, Trump claimed that there were very few women and children among the Syrian refugees. Two surveys by the U.N. count the number of Syrian refugees in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the number of refugees that have crossed the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. In both surveys, women and children make up approximately 50 percent of the total refugee count.
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In just the past two months, the GOP frontrunner has raised many red flags with fact checkers
Donald Trump seems to be on an unstoppable charge to the Republican presidential nomination, even though there's been a plethora of news reports challenging various claims he has made in the past two months alone. Here are some of his greatest hits.
