Trump’s brief statement comes as Trump has sought to court African-American voters, who have been cool to his overtures.
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As late as Wednesday, he would not acknowledge that Obama was born in Hawaii, declining to address the matter in a Washington Post interview published late Thursday night.
After years of peddling a false conspiracy theory that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Donald Trump – just 53 days before Election Day – now says he believes the president was born in the U.S.
However, there may be much more than just meet the eye given that the issue was first brought into the limelight by Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign.
There is no evidence that Clinton supported or perpetuated the birther movement, according to FactCheck.org. While there had been rumors circulating before 2011 about Obama’s birthplace, Trump is widely credited with bringing birtherism into the mainstream. Trump’s comments were seen by many as an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president and have turned off numerous African American voters he is now courting in his bid for the White House.
Mr. Trump said Hillary Clinton brought it up during the 2008 presidential campaign. “There is no erasing it in history”.
“And the President feels that the fact that there’s one nominee who won’t voluntarily make them public is something the American people should consider as they evaluate their choices for president of the United States”, Earnest said.
Thursday afternoon Donald Trump sat on his campaign plane talking with the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who asked him if he thought President Obama was a citizen of the United States. Well, I’m not that shocked. I was pretty confident about where I was born. His response? “I think it hangs over the reporters”. My hope would be the presidential election reflects more serious issues than that.
Mr Trump’s letter said he is 6ft 3in and 236lb (16st 12lb) – giving him a body mass index falling into the “overweight” range. So my friends, there is no new Donald Trump.
“I’m going to have a big statement made today at the hotel. That’s something you don’t hear from government”.
For many years, Trump was the most prominent proponent of the “birther” movement, which claimed Obama was born outside the US – despite the fact that he was born in Hawaii. He added, “The president should come clean”.
The White House has long viewed Trump’s claims as racist, aimed at delegitimising the president. “Right now, I have real doubts”.
So far, Trump has not commented on the whether he now believes that Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya as he and others known as “birthers” have said.
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Mr Miller says Mr Trump ended the “ugly incident” by compelling Mr Obama to release his birth certificate. The campaign’s chief “spokesperson is putting it out from the campaign”.
