Republicans are waging a three-pronged campaign of dishonesty on Donald Trump’s birther history. There’s the false claim that Hillary Clinton was the original birther. There’s the false claim that Trump stopped pushing birtherism when President Obama released his birth certificate. And there’s the claim that Trump “put the issue to rest” or “resolved” the issue, which Greg Sargent tackles:
… their position right now is simultaneously that Trump’s years-long effort to “settle” this “issue” was nonetheless a defensible exercise that had a positive outcome. Indeed, their position is essentially that this “issue” might not be sufficiently settled for many people if Trump had not launched his crusade. In short, it’s that Trump finally got Obama to cough up his papers, and now we can all move on — thanks to Trump’s efforts.
Thank you, Donald Trump! Your years of whipping up racist suspicion of the president’s legitimacy have finally allowed you and only you to bring to an end our national nightmare of racist suspicion of the president’s legitimacy. (Except it hasn’t been brought to an end.) This little Republican campaign to deflect blame for birtherism while taking the credit for supposedly fixing it led some Trump campaign surrogates to make some eyebrow-raising statements over the weekend.
CNN’s Jake Tapper had to sit there and say to Chris Christie, repeatedly, that yes, Donald Trump did continue being a birther long after Obama released his birth certificate, as Christie lied so shamelessly that the Washington Post’s fact checker wrote:
This is why Americans hate politics. A sitting governor goes on national television and when he is called out for an obvious falsehood, he simply repeats the inaccurate talking points over and over.
This will possibly be our shortest fact check ever.
Mike Pence got shot down by ABC’s Martha Raddatz when he tried to blame Clinton for originating birther theories. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blamed Democrats in general. Alex Castellanos, a strategist for a pro-Trump Super PAC, said that “there’s an otherness to the president.” (Gosh, wonder what that otherness is? There’s no way to look at a row of portraits of past presidents and see it.)
It’s clear that Republicans got their talking points: blame Democrats and praise Trump for ending any possible doubt simply by making a 30-second statement five years after the fact. The talking points are almost as false and insidious as the original birther conspiracy theory. Almost. But not quite.
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