Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said he has the advantage over Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton when it comes to smarts.
During the March 30 episode of MSNBC's "Hardball," host Chris Matthews asked Trump if it was a good idea for the U.S. to send troops to Iraq in 2003.
"I think it's one of the worst decisions in the history of our country," Trump replied.
Matthews then followed up by asking if Trump believes he is “more hawkish or less hawkish” than Clinton.
“I’m probably more intelligent than Hillary,” Trump said, to laughter in the audience.
“Oh come on,” Matthews said. “Answer the question. Are you more likely to engage militarily than Hillary?”
"I would have never gone into Iraq and I said from a very, early day, from the earliest day, 'I don't want to go into Iraq,'" Trump said. "Now, I was a real estate guy, a business guy, so nobody really cared that much. I said you were gonna destabilize the Middle East and that happened. Now, when we got out of Iraq, we got out the wrong way. We set a date, which was terrible. We should have left some soldiers back.”
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, more than 242,000 people have been killed, including at least 156,000 civilians and 5,000 U.S. soldiers, according to Iraq Body Count. Clinton, who advocated for the war and voted to give then-President George W. Bush authorization to invade Iraq, has been criticized for her role in one of the most controversial foreign policy decisions in U.S. history.
Clinton now calls her advocacy and vote a “mistake.”
“I made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple,” the former secretary of state recently told reporters, according to Politico. “And I have written about it in my book, I have talked about it in the past. What we now see is a very different and very dangerous situation.”
The U.S. military has recently increased the number of troops in Iraq in an effort to fight ISIS.
Sources: MSNBC, Iraq Body Count, Politico / Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr