The birther conspiracy theory was always obviously racist, but let’s just leave that aside for a minute.
President Obama’s mother was a United States citizen and therefore he would always have been one too, even if he had been born overseas, so there would never have been any plausible reason to lie about his birthplace to begin with. But let’s also leave that aside for a minute.
Let’s just go ahead and suppose, for the sake of argument, that every birther fever dream was true. Let’s suppose the president was indeed born in Africa. Now, this was 1961. The Civil Rights Movement still ongoing. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Loving vs Virginia ruling that made mixed-race marriage legal in all fifty states... all of these were still years in the future.
So, we are to believe that in 1961, some shadowy someone orchestrated an elaborate conspiracy — falsifying newspaper birth announcements, birth records, hospital records, school records at the University of Hawaii — the friends and family of the young parents all had to get their stories down pat — because this shadowy all-powerful someone believed that a mixed-race newborn infant named Barack Hussein Obama would have a really good shot at growing up to run for President of the United States in the year 2008, and win.
That, my friends, is planning ahead. That’s a real bank-shot.
Now, Donald Trump? Did not think that story was far-fetched.
Go ahead and let that sink in for a minute.
Donald Trump thought that conspiracy theory sounded really plausible. So he pushed and promoted it for five straight years.
Now he says he doesn’t believe it anymore, and that I started the whole thing.
And that’s false, obviously. And of the ways you know it’s false? Because I am not a credulous ninny.
