Clinton responded to a Trump campaign statement released late Thursday that acknowledged Obama’s US birth.
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Aside from providing a secondhand answer about Trump’s birther beliefs, the statement was also an excellent illustration of the Trump campaign’s playbook.
With just over seven weeks to the presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are on the campaign trail, each making appearances at separate events in Washington, D.C. where they both addressed the so-called “birther” issue.
Factcheck.org has investigated this claim and wrote in November 2008 that the claim that Mr. Obama had not been born in Hawaii had been circulated in late spring of that year by “diehard Hillary Clinton supporters”, as the Democratic nomination slipped away from Clinton. “I want to focus on other things”, he said.
Georgia continues to appear surprisingly competitive, with the latest Fox 5 Opinion Savvy poll showing Trump ahead by only four, 46% to 42%, in this Southern “red” state.
“You watch my statement”, Trump responded. Clinton’s figure is 28 percent.
Clinton promptly and properly slammed him at a Latino event. Save it for 2050. Obama’s word that he was not a Muslim, but when pressed if she believed he was, she replied, “No”. Tim Kaine recalled Donald Trump decrying immigrants, many from Mexico, as rapists and criminals.
Regardless of the controversy’s origins, Trump has used it to launch his political career. Obama was born in Hawaii.
One of Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., said Thursday that Miller’s statement “should be the definitive end” of questions about his father’s position. “This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer”, the statement continues.
Clinton slammed Trump’s comments to the Post while speaking at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute event in Washington Thursday, saying he needs to stop his “ugliness” and “bigotry”.
In January, Trump still would not acknowledge the President’s place of birth. Here, he’s saying that she’s politically weak as well.
Trump had promised “a big announcement” about the birther issue, giving the impression it was the goal of the event at his hotel. “There is no erasing it in history”, Clinton said at the Black Women’s Agenda Symposium.
Clinton’s campaign tweeted, “President Obama’s successor can not and will not be the man who led the racist birther movement”.
Now, the small grain of truth here is that a few Clinton supporters did circulate the theory online during the contentious 2008 primary, according to Politico’s Ben Smith.
“In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate”, Miller said. The birther movement – questioning the legitimacy of the first black president – has proven to be problematic for Trump in his attempts to appeal to black voters.
Donald Trump spent a lot of time raising doubts over President Obama’s birth certificate in 2011.
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Nonpartisan fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked this claim, as you can see at PolitiFact, FactCheck, CNN, and the Washington Post.
