However, earlier Thursday, Trump was unwilling to say that Obama was born in the US. Mrs Clinton had issued a statement over the weekend saying she regretted using the word “half” but persisted with the view that his campaign was built on “prejudice and paranoia”.
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Clinton told supporters Thursday that while sitting at home this week was “pretty much the last place I wanted to be”, the time away from campaign events helped clarify how she wants to close her race against the billionaire real estate mogul Trump.
Aside from providing a secondhand answer about Trump’s birther beliefs, the statement was also an excellent illustration of the Trump campaign’s playbook.
“I don’t talk about it because if I talk about that, your whole thing will be about that”, he told reporters aboard his plane last week. “The reason I don’t is because then everyone is going to be talking about it as opposed to jobs, the military, the vets, security”.
The Republican candidate had been a leader of the “birther” movement that questioned Hawaii-born Mr Obama’s citizenship.
Clinton said a comprehensive immigration reform will not only be the right thing to do, but it will add United States dollars 700 billion to USA economy and enable America to be what it’s always been – a place where people from around the world can come to reunite with family, start new businesses, pursue their dreams, apply their talents to American growth and innovation.
Miller portrayed the move as the logical result of an altruistic attempt by Trump to seek the truth about the president’s birthplace that he claimed was first raised by Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.
“Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States”. Politifact and FactCheck.org write that 2008 Clinton supporters were early sources of the rumor that President Obama was born overseas, but that there was no evidence that Clinton or her campaign staffers had anything to do with it. “So we’ve got to come back twice as strong and twice as clear”, she said.
Asked by the paper whether his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was accurate when she said in a recent television interview that her boss now believes the president was born in the U.S., Trump was equally evasive.
For years, Trump was the most prominent proponent of the “birther” idea that Obama was born outside the U.S. It provided Trump with his entry into Republican politics and for years has defined his status as an “outsider” who is willing to challenge convention. Five years ago, Trump became the loudest voice in the so-called “birther” movement, advancing the false claim that President Obama was born outside the United States. I want to focus on jobs. As recently as Thursday, Trump would not acknowledge Obama’s birthplace, declining to address the matter when asked by The Washington Post.
Trump has declined other opportunities in the past two weeks to refute his original birtherism. “And he still wouldn’t say Hawaii”, Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, said a speech following one by Obama at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute annual gala on Thursday night. “When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry”, she said.
FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, wrote of Clinton and the “birther” movement previous year, “While it’s true that some of her ardent supporters pushed the theory, there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with it”. In the tweets, Trump cast doubt on the veracity of the document. “I believe it. He believes it”. Addressing young Latinos, Clinton said half of Latino voters are under 35 and said to young Latinos, “We need you”.
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A few years into his presidency, Obama, the first African American to win the White House, released a longer version of his birth certificate to answer those who suggested he was not USA born. “I would like to have him show his birth certificate, and can I be honest with you, I hope he can”, Trump said on NBC’s “Today” show.
