Trump acknowledges Obama was born in the United States

But the issue isn’t likely to die down any time soon – especially as Trump continues to falsely blame Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for starting the “birtherism” controversy.

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”. “Period”, said Trump, reversing himself on a controversy about Obama’s birth that the Republican helped launch but that had become a distraction to his White House bid.

Trump has made strenuous attempts to improve his dismal standing among minority voters and moderate Republicans in recent weeks, many of which see birtherism as racially motivated and an insult to Obama.

Republican nominee Donald Trump gets a lot of flak for questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace, but Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton supported the idea all the way back in 2008.

So this is the Trump campaign’s attempted spin on the whole incident: that in embracing and advancing a conspiracy theory, Trump won, and Clinton lost.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed on September 16 that Hillary Clinton was responsible for starting the birther movement that accused President Obama of lying about his birthplace. The Trump campaign wants out of this issue and the biggest stumbling block is their own candidate: Donald J. Trump.

“Well, I’m not that shocked actually – It’s fairly typical”, President Obama told ABC Friday morning.

This is not the first time that Trump has accused Clinton of first raising questions about Obama’s birthplace, an assertion that has been repeatedly disproved by fact-checkers who found no evidence that Clinton or her campaign questioned Obama’s birth certificate or his citizenship.

The North Carolina man called in Sunday and spoke to Heather McGhee, the president of public policy organization Demos.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Clinton said, “When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?”. Trump claimed that he “finished” the issue in 2011 when Obama released his long-form birth certification, but that isn’t true. “And Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology”, she added. “There is no new Donald Trump”, she said.

Donald Trump finally admitted Friday that “President Barack Obama was born in the United States”, reversing himself on the issue that propelled him into national politics five years ago. In 2012, The New York businessman wrote on Twitter that the president’s birth certificate was “a fraud”. “His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie”, she told the Black Women’s Agenda Symposium in Washington, DC.

Appearing Friday on “New Day” on CNN, Sanders offered a caustic rejection of the Trump campaign’s statement, put out by spokesman Jason Miller on Thursday night.

Trump has been given several opportunities in this campaign to say that he disavowed the theory (or still believes it).

Advertisement

But the birther movement, which casts doubt over whether Obama is legally able to be president, incenses black Americans whose votes Trump has been trying to court. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. An additional 31 percent of Republicans neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement and only a quarter of Republicans surveyed believed Obama was born in the U.S. “It was delegitimizing the first African-American president”.