“I believe Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, I accept his birthplace”.
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“I just don’t know where he’s coming from on foreign policy and on economics and on ObamaCare”, Pence added.
Even Mike Pence isn’t buying the birther theories that his running mate Donald Trump has pushed.
OK, “I accept his birthplace” is a weird Hoosierish way of putting it, but Pence is plainly positioning himself to lead the Empirical Reality wing of the Republican base in 2020. “The polls are encouraging”.
On Sunday, when WPVI-TV, a Philadelphia ABC affiliate, asked Trump whether he regretted his incessant conspiracy-theory mongering over the veracity of Obama’s birth certificate, the GOP nominee gruffly replied, “I don’t talk about it anymore”. Obama eventually made public a copy of his birth certificate, but Trump didn’t totally buy it.
But a year ago, with his own presidential campaign underway, Trump shifted his rhetoric, telling Late Show host Stephen Colbert, “I don’t talk about that anymore”.
The airport didn’t bring out a grand staircase for Air Force One on Mr. Obama’s recent arrival for an overseas trip, and Mr. Trump had said Tuesday if he had been given a similar tarmac reception he’d have closed up the plane and left the country. On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly dodged questions, claiming that “I don’t talk about it”.
Trump jumped into the birther conspiracy fracas in 2011, when he famously questioned whether Obama was born in the U.S.
Trump was asked about Obama’s birthplace on Monday by NBC’s Ali Vitali.
Also that month, following Trump’s nasty criticism of the Muslim-American parents of a fallen US soldier, Pence issued a statement thanking them for the sacrifice their son made.
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Still, Ben Carson, another Trump surrogate, says now is a good time to apologize for inciting the movement.
