Donald Trump gave a good Town Hall performance last night on CNN. Sure, he said the same insane stuff he’s been saying for months, but for people who only see him in snippets on the evening news ranting about Mexicans or Muslims, he probably seemed pretty human. He dodged all the usual questions with his usual bravado and obsessed about his own greatness. But he was comfortably sitting down and seemed relaxed and confident and unintimidating. After all, he’s not really a politician, he’s a celebrity. He dished on his famous friends and his three beautiful wives and their children and talked about how very, very rich he is. He even shared that he’s a clean freak who prefers to eat at fast food chains like McDonalds on the road because he thinks they have higher sanitation standards. It was more like watching an Oprah interview with a TV star than a political interview.

That this happened on the same day that Trump got into a huge public fight with the Pope makes it all the more amazing. But then that’s Trump’s specialty. He makes sure he dominates the news cycle somehow. By day he’s calling out the Pope and by night he’s talking about his pal Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery. Frankly, he’s just more interesting than any politician out there. It’s a shame about his authoritarian white nationalist program and the fact the job of president requires many more skills than those that have gotten him this far.

This is not to say that he didn’t have to answer political questions from the audience. But they all seemed in awe of him, even the one who tried to corner him for boldly declaring that Bush was president on 9/11 and that “they” lied about the WMD in Iraq. The questioner told Trump that he had a great deal of respect for George W. Bush and said those comments had “stung him very deeply.” And then he plaintively begged, “with some time passing have you thought about that? Would you rethink that?”

Needless to say Trump has not rethought it and has no intention of rethinking it. (After all, this is a man who calls himself a Christian but says he’s never once felt the need to ask God for forgiveness.) In fact, he took his complaints even further, saying that not only did Bush make the worst decision any president has ever made but he caused the rise of ISIS, the Syrian refugee crisis and turned all of Europe into a seething hellhole. He repeated over and over again that Iraq didn’t take down the World Trade Center and even made this odd comment:

“Iraq did not knock down the World Trade Center. Where did these people go when they got on the airplane? Do you know where they went? A lot of them went to Saudi Arabia. They didn’t go back to Iraq, they went to Saudi Arabia.”

The hijackers never got on a plane to anywhere since they were all dead. And if he’s referencing rumors that members of the Saudi Royal family were spirited out of the country it’s a very weird way of putting it. Basically that’s Trump rambling incoherently on the subject. But if there’s one thing Trump has been crystal clear about from the beginning is that he (and he alone, apparently) knew Iraq was a mistake and he made it known that he was against it.

But then this happened:

COOPER: I literally was just handed this. There’s a report out on BuzzFeed, including an audio clip of what appears to be you on Howard Stern talking on the radio on September 11, 2002. He asked you, ‘Are you for invading Iraq?’ You said, ‘Yeah I guess so. You know, I wish it was done correctly the first time.’ Is this accurate? Do you remember saying this?”

TRUMP: No, but I could have said that. Nobody asked me. I wasn’t a politician. This was probably the first time anybody asked me that question. But by the time the war started…

COOPER: This was 2002.

TRUMP: By the time the war started, I was against the war. There are articles, headlines in 2003 and 2004, I was totally against the war…

COOPER: 2004—there’s a Reuters article which you pointed to a lot, and there were a couple comments you made at a Vanity Fair party, that were a couple of weeks after the war began.

TRUMP: Which is OK. A lot of people said it was so early, even if it was a little bit after the war. I was very much against it. That was probably the it — the first time I was asked about the war. He’s a great guy. Howard. Howard Stern…

COOPER: He is a great interviewer

TRUMP That was probably the first time I was asked about it. When you’re in the private sector, you get asked things and you’re not a politician and probably the first time I was asked. By the time the war started, I was against it. Shortly thereafter, I was really against it.

Millions of people were against the war long before it started. There were protests all over the world. Trump was no oracle on this issue. Not that any sentient being ever thought he was.

The real question is whether his followers will care about this and the answer is no. Brian Beutler at The New Republic explained exactly why that is: