As late as Wednesday night, Donald Trump, the person who did more to promote the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, once again refused to retract his racist-driven conspiracy theory. And suddenly, late on Thursday night, the Trump campaign’s Senior Communications Advisor Jason Miller issued a statement, claiming that Trump has given up his birther ways:
In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. 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. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.
First of all, as has been repeatedly debunked, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did not start this racist-driven smear. Period. It’s a lie. Call it one.
Second, Trump brought “this ugly incident to its conclusion” in 2011? Bullshit. A month after Obama had released his birth certificate, Trump was chatting it up with Jerome Corsi and said it was a forgery. In 2012, he tweeted that an “extremely credible source” told him it was “a fraud,” he called on Republicans to “go on the offensive” on it, he congratulated Sheriff Joe Arpaio for proving “the ‘birth certificate’ is a fake,” along with complaints about the media’s silence on the subject. In 2013, he called it a “computer generated forgery, and he inferred that the man who verified the “birth certificate” died under suspicious circumstances. In 2014, Trump promoted tweets about it being “fabricated,” called on hackers to check Obama’s place of birth, and in an interview, Trump:
… kept veering off on long, excited tangents about forged birth certificates and presidential coverups ... “I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure it was right.”
Yeah, Trump brought the “ugly incident to a close” in 2011.
So, what prompted the press release? Did his campaign realize how it looked for Trump to go into a Black church in Flint, Michigan, to “joke” about its poisoned water and then run to Fox News the next morning to insult and lie about the church’s pastor? Or was it Hillary Clinton calling Trump out on Thursday about his most recent refusal to disavow his racist birther movement, asking, “When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?” Who knows? But there is one other thing to remember here:
So officially, Donald Trump has renounced nothing. Not his racist birther stance … or, for that matter, the many, many lies from his campaign’s press release. We’ll have to see how many media outfits cheerfully report that “Donald Trump said ...” while cooing about his tremendous outreach to communities of color. Stay tuned