Esquire Adds Editor’s Note To 2004 Article Trump Keeps Citing Because He “Won’t Stop Lying”

During Wednesday night’s Commander In Chief Forum broadcast by NBC, GOP nominee repeated the same lie he’s been telling since his campaign began — he opposed the Iraq War from the start. Despite this falsehood being debunked numerous times and there being no evidence of him opposing the war until 2004 when public sentiment shifted, he’s continued to say it over and over.

Moderator Matt Lauer has come under fire for not following up on the lie and pressing him on it, especially since he knew it was coming. While Lauer decided to rollover for Trump, one publication did push back on the pathological liar. Since Trump keeps citing an article that ran in Esquire in August 2004 as rock-solid evidence of his opposition, the magazine decided to add an editor’s note.

Editor’s note: The following story was published in the August 2004 issue of Esquire. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed to have been against the Iraq War from the beginning, and he has cited this story as proof. The Iraq War began in March 2003, more than a year before this story ran, thus nullifying Trump’s timeline. More details can be found here.

The mag’s deputy editor, John Hendrickson, sent out the following tweet providing the reason why he added the note to the piece.

Because Donald Trump won’t stop lying, we’ve updated our 2004 story with an editor’s note: https://t.co/dhHfecJkaz pic.twitter.com/6rp7da1Sod

— John Hendrickson (@JohnGHendy) September 8, 2016

A few points on this. One, as has been pointed out by many, many, many people already — THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2004! The publication date was 17 months AFTER the war started. The debate over whether we should go into Iraq was waging for at least a year before the invasion. If you said you were against the war in the summer of 2004, you were way late to the party.

Two, Trump wrote this article. Yes. He wrote it for the magazine. This wasn’t a full-fledged interview conducted by a reporter. Trump just wrote about how awesome he’d be as a leader. And, on top of that, he doesn’t explicitly say he was against it from the start in the article, either. He just talks about how it was a mistake after we’ve seen what’s happened.

My life is seeing everything in terms of “How would I handle that?” Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he’ll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn’t have.

What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!

All this is is hindsight. Nothing more. This isn’t him saying, “See! I was right the WHOLE TIME!” No. He’s just criticizing after the fact, saying how he would have done a better job if he was in charge.

Three, regarding Esquire trolling Trump: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!