Matt Lauer may not have pushed back when Donald Trump claimed that a 2004 quote criticizing the Iraq war showed that he had been opposed to the war before it started in 2003, but Lauer’s failure has nonetheless put the spotlight on Trump’s lie. With the media finally talking about how Trump habitually lies on this subject—and Esquire magazine having added an editor's note to the 2004 story Trump likes to point to—Trump is trying to find new ways to claim he opposed invading Iraq before it happened.
Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway spun out a boatload of nonsense on this front in response to pressure from Charlie Rose, claiming that “If he had been in the United States Senate he would have casted a vote against the war,” a thing we know “Because he said so. The same thing that Senator Obama said he would’ve done in 2008 and everyone just took him at his word.” Except that 1) Trump didn’t say so, a fact that had been pointed out literally moments before Conway claimed he had; and 2) Obama was very clearly on the record opposing the war at the time.
The big thing Lauer failed to press Trump with and Conway pretended didn’t happen is a 2002 interview with Howard Stern in which Trump said “Yeah, I guess” he supported the invasion, an interview Conway characterized as happening “contemporaneously” with the 2004 interview in which he opposed the war. (Fact check: 2004 came after 2002.) That Howard Stern interview may be the only time Trump is on the record discussing Iraq before Congress voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade—important, since Trump is trying to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton’s Senate vote.
Trump is now brandishing a quote from January 2003 in which he told Neil Cavuto that “perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations” and suggested the economy was more important than Iraq. But that March, again talking to Cavuto, Trump directly linked Iraq and the economy, saying “I think Wall Street's just going to go up like a rocket, even beyond,” what with the invasion looking “like a tremendous success from a military standpoint.” Four days later he’d gone from “a tremendous success” to “a mess.”
In short, Trump was going whichever way the wind blew, and now that the right answer is clear, he’s pretending he was clear and consistent from the beginning. But it’s typical Trump: he took different positions according to the political environment and his personal mood, and now he wants credit for the one that looks good in retrospect and for the others to be forgotten. And refusing to engage with reality may even help him with the Republican base.