This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 18th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's difficult to take a lot of what Donald Trump says very seriously, given his propensity to offer up regularly contradictory

statements but when he attempts a serious policy speech it's worth examining

his words carefully. Ben Friedman is a research fellow in defense and

Homeland Security studies at the Cato Institute. We spoke today.

Donald Trump gave a speech earlier in the week in Youngstown, Ohio with his plans for counterterrorism.

And as you mentioned, it's sort of challenging to deal with in the sense that one has to clear

away the underbrush of factual errors of which I in a speech

counted 7 to 9 depending on how you categorize things about NATO's counterterrorism about the number of

Middle Eastern immigrants about the intelligence scandal with

Central Command about the rate of ISIS attacks about how many countries

ISIS is operational in about about honor killings but I think most importantly of the factual errors

Trump implied that he was against the war in Libya, which he wasn't.

He was adamantly for it.

He also said that he was against the war in Iraq

from the beginning, which is just blatantly false, as many reporters have written and

demonstrated.

He gave quotes, Trump did, to indicate that he was against the war in Iraq from the beginning,

and the quotes don't indicate that, really. against the and the substance, in this case of his counterterrorism policy,

aside from his plan to get tough on Muslim immigrants

by having some sort of ideological vetting.

...