Of Course: Trump Backed Multiple Policies He Condemned in Foreign Policy Address

Guy Benson | April 28, 2016 10:36 AM

Donald Trump's foreign policy address yesterday was a mishmash of good ideas, incandescent contradictions and feel-good assertions of things he'd do "quickly" as president, with very little offered in the way of explaining

how he'd pull off this remarkable global winning streak. The point of the speech -- which was clearly written by someone other than the principal, who managed to recite it relatively smoothly, with occasional extemporized flourishes such as "very bad!" -- was to check a box, and offer the cameras some optics with presidential trimmings. On that score, I think it was probably a success. Dig even the slightest bit deeper, and the inconsistencies begin pile up. Here's a series of big ones, elucidated at length by Andrew McCarthy at NRO, and succinctly distilled by...Hillary Clinton's campaign:

Trump slammed Iraq, Libya, Egypt interventions.

But he backed all 3https://t.co/XSey5oBWDk https://t.co/2015ynvdTJ https://t.co/s5EntbRGdv
— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) April 27, 2016

Thanks for the reminder of Hillary's terrible interventionist record, Jesse. But yes, like John Kerry (to whom he donated over President Bush), Donald Trump supported the Iraq War before he was against it. His claim that he was a bold early voice against a conflict that most Americans now view as a mistake is unsupported by facts. Trump also criticized Obama/Clinton policies in Egypt and Libya, ripping the latter intervention as an unnecessary humanitarian endeavor that betrayed his "America First" philosophy (he also said in the same speech that America should be "ashamed" for not intervening on humanitarian grounds to help persecuted Christians). Not only did he praise Hillary Clinton for her work as Secretary of State roughly a year after the foolish military action

she championed within the Obama administration, he demanded US military action in advance of the bombings. And he did so on camera. First, watch Trump claim at a debate that he was never a Libya intervention advocate, and that he'd never even weighed in on the subject. Then watch the back half the clip, featuring his 2011 rant about how "we should go in" to Libya to stop the "carnage," which would help the people topple Qaddafi, echoing Clinton's justification at the time:

One big theme of Trump's Tuesday remarks was the importance of crafting a "coherent" American foreign policy -- an outcome he said that he alone can bring about, believe him. Given his flip-flops on all three of these recent conflicts, as well as his multiple about-faces on ground troops vs. ISIS, why would anyone believe he's capable of forming a cogent, consistent policy, let alone carry it out -- aside from blind faith? I'll leave you with Trump's big "plan" to defeat ISIS: