Why Trump's Iraq War and birther skulduggery is so devastating

Donald Trump's personal appeal this election is supposed to be grounded in his savvy business acumen, but he only talks about his vast, global business network in general terms and discourages too much scrutiny. Really, his credibility rests on three articles of faith: He wins, he has better judgment than Hillary Clinton because she voted for the Iraq War and he opposed it, and he did everyone a favor as the lone establishment figure loudly questioning President Obama's American birth.

When challenged on any of those tenets, Trump doubles down, often going into detailed, convoluted explanations about why he won — on Wednesday, CNN reports, Trump angrily berated advisers and aides who said he lost the first presidential debate — or how he was such a serious threat to the Iraq War that President George W. Bush sent a team to "silence" him, or why Hillary Clinton is the real villain in the "birther" controversy and he's the hero.

A fair reading of the record shows he's wrong on all those counts, strongly suggesting one of two things: Donald Trump has convinced himself they are true, or he's so invested in self-serving lies that he can't let them go and move on. Either one is a dangerous trait in a United States president.

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Those are serious accusations, and before we look at the evidence, let's acknowledge that Trump is a formidable, natural politician who is, as Mike Konczal notes persuasively, "fantastic at setting up problems" and "very clear on how he sees the problems, be they foreign trade, immigration from Muslim countries and Mexico, law and order, 'political correctness,' and so forth." It is not a coincidence that his best poll numbers were from the weeks he spent largely on-message and on-teleprompter.

By the accounts of his own staff, Trump isn't very good at absorbing facts and details, and people who've worked with him, know him well, or studied him up close say he has a very short attention span. Trump doesn't really dispute that characterization — he's the big-picture guy who will Make America Great Again, leaving the details to others. But Trump does pay attention to details if he's interested. And what he's interested in isn't very encouraging.

Let's start with Trump's puerile excuse for his birtherism — arguably the issue most responsible for his success in the GOP primary. At the first presidential debate, moderator Lester Holt asked him why it took him so long — until Sept. 16 — to acknowledge that Obama was born in Hawaii. Here was his answer:

That is a lot of detail, even if much of it is wrong or misleading. Patti Solis Doyle told CNN that Clinton had quickly fired a low-level campaign worker who forwarded a birther conspiracy email then she called Obama's campaign manager to apologize and disavow the message. And Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton family confidante and informal Clinton 2008 adviser, only suggested McClatchy send a reporter to see if Obama was born in Kenya, according to former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher. (Blumenthal denies it.)

In this case, though, the details don't really matter. Clinton never publicly questioned if Obama is American, and there's no evidence she did so privately. Trump suggested on TV that Obama was born abroad repeatedly, even this year, five years after Obama released his long-form birth certificate and eight years after he released his certificate of live birth — something no other president or presidential nominee has been pressured to do, even though Obama's 2008 Republican rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), was born in Panama.

Trump could have easily shrugged off Holt's question, saying something like, "Of course Obama was born in Hawaii, and that's what's important," then refusing to say more. He should have apologized — as Clinton did when Holt asked about her State Department emails. Instead he tried to equate his years of very public birtherism with a quickly repudiated email from a state-level Clinton staffer and a private 2007 conversation that did not surface until two weeks ago. It's enough to make your head explode.

This same confusion between private conversations and public pronouncement was also on glaring display in the debate when Trump repeatedly insisted, over Holt's objections, that he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump's first public comment on the looming invasion was, as Trump noted in the debate, his 2002 response to a question from Howard Stern about if he supported invading Iraq: "Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish the first time it was done correctly." Here's the case for his opposition as he laid it out in the debate:

Again, a lot of details. In this case, the facts are either mostly accurate or unverifiable — on Wednesday, Stern said Trump was only "kind of for the Iraq war, us going into Iraq," in 2002; Fox News reposted the Cavuto clip, and it showed ambivalence about the invasion two months beforehand; Sean Hannity said that yes, they had fights over the war; and in an August 2004 interview with Esquire, more than a year after the invasion, Trump did call the Iraq War a pointless "mess," said there were no weapons of mass destruction and no chance of democracy in Iraq, and said he would have handled it differently. But all of these details are, again, mostly irrelevant.

It is valid to point out that nobody should have cared much what a real estate developer and reality TV star thought about the invasion of Iraq in 2002 or 2003, and that Clinton's vote to authorize the invasion (and the affirmative vote of Trump's running mate, Mike Pence) is a much more relevant issue. W. James Antle III further points out at The Washington Examiner that Trump should "deserve at least some credit for opposing the war before most Republicans and many liberal hawks," including Hillary Clinton.

Trump himself could make that very case: He publicly said the Iraq War was a bad idea years before Clinton did. But instead, as Antle notes, "Trump has exaggerated the import of whatever doubts he had about the war at the time, as is his wont." And then he gets to the heart of the matter: "To make Iraq prescience as central to his claim to having better judgment than Clinton as Trump has, his opposition should have been expressed far more widely than in private conversations with Sean Hannity."

Lots of people publicly opposed the Iraq invasion before it happened — including Antle. At least 100,000 people took to the streets of New York on Feb. 15, 2013, joining several million around the world, to try to stop the Iraq War. Bill Clinton secretly tried to head off Bush's invasion through a campaign of "rogue diplomacy," at the behest of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to a new book by liberal journalist Joe Conason. Pope John Paul II was vocally opposed to the war. Trump? Maybe he argued privately with Hannity.

Here's the point: There is zero evidence that Trump took a public stand against the war, or that Clinton pushed the birther nonsense, and when you are president, what you believe in private is not nearly as important as what you say in public. What you believe in private, in fact, may not matter much at all. Did LBJ have doubts about the Vietnam War? Yes, but he publicly supported the escalation and sent over more than a million U.S. troops. Did Clinton have doubts about giving Bush the power to invade Iraq if diplomacy failed? Yes, and she said so in public, but voted in favor anyway.

"Words matter," Clinton said in the debate, "words matter when you run for president and they really matter when you are president." Trump, on the other hand, seemed to dismiss the importance of words relative to action: "Look it's all words. It's all soundbites."

Whichever theory of semantics you subscribe to, neither Trump's private views on Iraq nor Clinton's public abstinence of birtherism are germane to Trump's case for holding the most powerful office in the world. What is devastatingly relevant is that Trump seems to think they are not just important, but a foundational element of his presidential campaign.