Donald Trump has been all over the map when it comes to Libya and their strongman dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, who seized power in a coup and ruled the country ruthlessly for 34 years. In the past, Trump had called for Gaddafi’s ouster, but now that Libya has become a failed state, Donald has said several times that the world would be better off if Gaddafi was still around.
One hundred percent,' Trump said when asked if the world would be better off with Saddam and Gaddafi still at the helm in Iraq and Libya.
As it turns out, Trump has millions of reasons to mourn the dethroning of his buddy Gaddafi.
Donald Trump says he made "a lot of money" in a deal years ago with Moammar Gadhafi, despite suggesting at the time he had no idea the former Libyan dictator was involved in renting his suburban New York estate. …
The presumptive Republican nominee was talking about a bizarre incident in 2009, when Gadhafi was in desperate search of a place to pitch his Bedouin-style tent during a visit to New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.
When Gaddafi came to New York, he shopped for a place to erect a massive tent, complete with surrounding palm trees and some camels. Everyone turned him down. Renting land to a military dictator that Ronald Reagan called a “mad dog” had most people turning away. But not Trump. He rented Gaddafi his Seven Springs property near Bedford—where Trump got more experience with lawsuits when the giant tent violated local ordinances.
At the time, Trump pretended to have no idea that this money was coming from the pocket of a brutal dictator. As it turned out ...
But Trump had changed his tune two years later, when he boasted of having "screwed" the Libyan leader on the deal.
"I dealt with Gadhafi. Excuse me. I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for the whole year or for two years. And then I didn't let him use the land. That's what we should be doing," Trump said in a 2011 interview with Fox News.
He reiterated the claim on CNN that same year. Trump said he had leased Gaddafi "a piece of land for his tent. He paid me more than I get in a whole year. And then, eh, he wasn't able to use the piece of land. ... So I got in one night more money than I would have gotten all year for this piece of land up in Westchester. And then didn't let him use it? That's called being intelligent," Trump said.
History, for Donald Trump, is a moving target. It exists only to make Trump look strong and important.