Donald Trump’s criticism of the Bush administration in an interview with Wolf Blitzer has received some attention, but this is not the first time this has occurred. In an interview Friday Trump called Bush, “probably the worst president in the history of the United States.” On Iraq he said, “I don’t know if they’re bad people. I don’t know what’s going on. I just know they got us into a mess, the likes of which this country has probably never seen,” Trump said. “It’s one of the great catastrophes of all time.” He also said the best course of action would be to “declare victory and leave.”
Trump expressed similar sentiments in July, 2004 when he called the decision to invade Iraq a “brutal mistake.” Besides arguing that we should have never gone in, Trump never fell for the claims that the war was to fight terrorism. “No matter how much you hate Saddam Hussein, and obviously he was a horror show, he kept terrorists out of Iraq,” Trump argued.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer in 2004 Trump also had favorable things to say about Democrats as opposed to Republicans and the economy:
BLITZER: Do you identify more as a Democrat or Republican?
TRUMP: Well, you’d be shocked if I said that in many cases I probably identify more as Democrat. And I think you’d probably be shocked…
BLITZER: On social issues?
TRUMP: You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been now around long — you know, I think of myself as a young guy, but I’m not so young anymore. And I’ve been around for a long time. And it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. Now, it shouldn’t be that way. But if you go back, I mean it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats…
BLITZER: Well, it certainly did well under Clinton. But I wouldn’t suggest it was so great under Jimmy Carter.
TRUMP: That’s true. That’s true.
BLITZER: If you remember, the interest rates…
TRUMP: No, I know. I know. Jimmy Carter was not in the same thing.
But certainly we had some very good economies under Democrats, as well as Republicans. But we’ve had some pretty bad disaster under the Republicans.
BLITZER: You want…
TRUMP: Including a thing called the Depression.
