The resurfacing of Mr. Trump’s doubts about Mr. Obama’s birthplace – in an interview with The Washington Post that was published on Thursday – comes less than two months before the general election and as he has been working more aggressively to court minority voters. “I just don’t want to answer it yet”, Trump told the newspaper.
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Coincidentally, Jason Miller, who now says Trump believes the president was born in the United States, worked for Ted Cruz in the primary. There’s a big difference between what fringe supporters of Clinton said at the time, who were disavowed by the candidate, and the campaign Trump himself undertook in the subsequent years. Now that he wants to be president, however, Trump expects Americans to believe he’s changed his mind?
“When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?”.
Trump then pivoted and tried to blame his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, for raising the issue and bragged that it was his pressure as a private citizen in 2011 that forced the president’s hand in releasing his birth certificate. This is the best he can do.
The White House eventually released President Obama’s long-form birth certificate showing that he was, indeed, born in Honolulu in 1961.
Trump was asked if his courtship of African-Americans could be stymied by the birther issue and “hang over his candidacy”. “This type of vicious and conniving behaviour is straight from the Clinton Playbook”.
He added, “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”.
While promoting his newest hotel in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Donald Trump finally put to rest the birther controversy he has so often fueled.
Although Trump Jr. said he was unsure if his father would come out and directly say Obama was born in the United States, he didn’t rule out a future tweet along those lines.
Trump can retract his birther statements about Obama all he wants, but does anybody actually believe him?
Obama, meanwhile, asked that the presidential campaign move on to more serious issues.
After Trump on Thursday again demurred on Obama’s nationality, his campaign was forced to issue a statement. He said Latinos need to “decide who the real America is” and push back against the notion that the nation “only includes a few of us”.
“How wonderful, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s “birth certificate” died in plane crash today”.
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Clinton, however, was not questioning Obama’s birthplace. He dispatched his personal lawyer to Hawaii to pick up copies and carry the documents back to Washington on a plane. Obama took to the White House Briefing Room to blast Trump as a “carnival barker”. “We have to – we have to keep the suspense going, okay?” It’s fairly typical. We got other things to attend to.
