I’ve long said that the pretty much everything the GOP, as a party, deeply believes in a is an crazed unproven conspiracy theory. Trickle down economics. Global Warming is a hoax. Liberals are out to get them. And of course, somehow, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was secretly born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and this was covered up and hidden specifically so that he would ultimately become the first black American President 50 years later.
What’s even worse is the cowardly claim that this particularly noxious trope was started by Hillary Cliinton as if all the Tea Party people who’ve touted it, and Donald Trump were therefore helpless to continue asking a question that had already long been answered over and over and over again.
So did Hillary begin Birtherism?
According to the article, the theory that Obama was born in Kenya “first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.”
The second article, which ran several days after the Politico piece, was published by the Telegraph, a British paper, which stated: “An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.”
Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”
Claims about Obama’s birthplace appeared in chain emails bouncing around the Web, and one of the first lawsuits over Obama’s birth certificate was filed by Philip Berg, a former deputy Pennsylvania attorney general and a self-described “moderate to liberal” who supported Clinton.
But none of those stories suggests any link between the Clinton campaign, let alone Clinton herself, and the advocacy of theories questioning Obama’s birth in Hawaii.
So was this a plot hatched by the Clinton campaign in ‘08 to undermine Obama then?
One of the authors of the Politico story, Byron Tau, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told FactCheck.org via email that “we never found any links between the Clinton campaign and the rumors in 2008.”
The other coauthor of the Politico story, Ben Smith, now the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, said in a May 2013 interview on MSNBC that the conspiracy theories traced back to “some of [Hillary Clinton’s] passionate supporters,” during the final throes of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. But he said they did not come from “Clinton herself or her staff.”
The unpaid staffers who circulated the birther/muslim emails were immediately fired by Patti Solis-Doyle. Clinton staffer Mark Penn who circulated a letter suggesting they should focus on Obama’s “un-American” tendencies was also eventually fired. Sid Blumenthal who supposedly asked about Obama being born in Kenya with a reporter from McClatchy was never part of the Clinton campaign, and that reporters answer after traveling to Kenya was “No, he wasn’t.”
It’s pretty clear considering the fact that Obama made her Secretary of State that Hillary Clinton is not a Birther. The same can not be said of Donald Trump.
Regardless of who started it or why, it’s been Donald Trump who’s been at it relentlessly for the past 7 years.
Trump: His grandmother said he was born in Kenya.
It’s been well established she was talking about her son, the President’s father, Barack Obama Sr. Trump goes on to argue with Meredith Viera that the Certificate of Live Birth that isn’t sufficient. Why? Cuz reasons.
it doesn’t have a serial number, it doesn’t have a signature. I’m starting to think he wasn’t born here. He spent $2 Million in legal fees trying to get away from this issue.
No. he didn’t.
In an interview on NBC's Today show, for example, Trump said Obama "spent $2 million in legal fees trying to get away from this issue." He repeated the figure in a CNN interview on April 10, 2011. "I just say very simply why doesn't he show his birth certificate?" Trump asked. "Why has he spent over $2 million in legal fees to keep this quiet and to keep this silent?"
In a Fox News appearance on April 10, 2011, Palin echoed the figure while praising Trump's efforts. Trump is "paying for researchers to find out why President Obama would have to spend $2 million to not show his birth certificate," Palin said. "So more power to him."
In an Oct. 27, 2009, article, WND reported that, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign had paid approximately $1.7 million to the campaign's law firm, Perkins Coie, since Obama was elected.
But what does that $2.6 million number mean? Not what Trump and others have assumed.
Specifically, the payments by Obama for America to Perkins Coie covered all sorts of legal expenses -- not just expenses related to birth certificate issues.
For the sake of comparison, the Roll Call story noted that the campaign for Obama's 2008 Republican opponent John McCain -- which was a smaller operation -- had spent more than $1.3 million on lawyers since the election.
The fact is that the majority of Trump supporters agree with what he said back in 2011 and even more of them believe that President Obama is secretly, a Muslim.
Our new poll finds that Trump is benefiting from a GOP electorate that thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in another country, and that immigrant children should be deported. 66% of Trump's supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim to just 12% that grant he's a Christian. 61% think Obama was not born in the United States to only 21% who accept that he was. And 63% want to amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, to only 20% who want to keep things the way they are.
Trump's beliefs represent the consensus among the GOP electorate. 51% overall want to eliminate birthright citizenship. 54% think President Obama is a Muslim. And only 29% grant that President Obama was born in the United States. That's less than the 40% who think Canadian born Ted Cruz was born in the United States.
What Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and all of these crazed GOPers constantly fail to explain is how and when did Obama’s mother Ann Dunham leave the United States just before giving birth, and then how and when did she return with a new born baby without going through immigration and customs or having it noted on her passport?
How’d that happen?
Even after the President released his long form certificate Trump. didn’t. stop. the. bullshit.
In the issued statement, the campaign praises Trump at length, and states that he brought the so-called birther issue to its conclusion in 2011 when Obama released his long-form birth certificate. But that’s false. Trump didn’t stop being a birther in 2011 — he continued stoking conspiracy theories after that.
In one 2014 exchange with Irish TV, for instance, he defended his birtherism at length.
“You questioned his citizenship during his campaign, and you said afterwards if he produced that long-form birth certificate, you’d produce your tax returns. But you didn’t do it, did you?” asked Ireland TV3’s Colette Fitzpatrick in May 2014.
“Well, I don’t know — did he do it?” Trump said. “If I decide to run for office I’ll produce my tax returns. Absolutely. I would love to do that. I did produce a financial statement even though I wasn’t even running. I did produce a financial statement and it was shocking to some because it was so much higher than people thought possible.”
This has, from day one, been part of the core of his campaign even though he’s refused to talk about it for 15 months.
In recent weeks Rudy Guiliani, Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and his running mate Mike Pence have all stated that Trump believes Obama was born in the U.S. But last night Donald Trump refused to answer a question from the Washington Post about it.
In the interview, conducted late Wednesday aboard his private plane as it idled on the tarmac here, Trump suggested he is not eager to change his pitch or his positions even as he works to reach out to minority voters, many of whom are deeply offended by his long-refuted suggestion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
And then his campaign issued this fracked-up statement at 11pm last night.
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.
Besides the fact that there was nothing wrong with his original certificate in the first place and there’s no evidence his mother left the country for no good reason Trump’s campaign not only fails to apologize they claim they deserve “Thanks” for hectoring the President on this for years and forcing him to send his attorneys to Hawaii to get his long form certificate?
The fact is they don’t get just how fucked up this has been the entire time as shown by this smug Trump surrogate Andy Dean who tries to downplay it by arguing that people question where Chester A. Arthur was born. Really, Chester A. Arthur!
“Throughout American history, there’s been questions as to peoples’ birthplaces,” Dean responded. “It has nothing to do with his skin color, as evidenced by the fact that five other individuals have gone through this.”
“You didn’t hear anything I said,” a perturbed Lemon replied. “You didn’t hear anything I said. You may not think it’s a race issue. I’m telling you how African-Americans feel about it and you’re denying how African-Americans feel about it.”
...
“He kind of stepped in the doggie poo with the Washington Post,” said [Van] Jones. “Hillary Clinton smacked him for it. He had somebody push out a statement for him, try to stop a little bit of the bleeding. At some point he’s going to have to stand up in front of the American people like you want anyone else to do with his own mouth and say that he was wrong. And it would be great for him to apologize.”
Jones also said that Trump’s campaign to get Obama to release his birth certificate felt to Black Americans “like it was a cheap shot at somebody who had a different skin color.”
“Apologize, show you’ve got some empathy, you might go somewhere with this,” he urged Trump. But Dean rejected the idea.
Seriously. People questioned Ted Cruz because he really was born in Canada. John McCain was born in Panama. George Romney was born in Mexico. All of them had U.S. born parents so this issue was resolved. Yet somehow, even though Obama’s mother was also born in the U.S. which mean he’s a U.S. citizen too even if he had been born in another country like Cruz, McCain and Romney why did this question persist for the last 7 years? What was the rationale for continuing this issue, when it was so easily to resolve as the others?
When you eliminate all plausible non-racist possibilities, all you have left is racism. That’s what it is and that’s what it’s been.
Certainly the GOP came after Bill Clinton hard. They claimed he was a murderer, that he bumped off Vince Foster, that he delt drugs, that he was a rapist. They Impeached him. But they never plotted to specifically sabotage him — and the country — from his first day in office.
According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.
For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.
“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
Is that just plain old partisanship, or is that something deeper, something uglier? We saw them do exactly what this meeting describes when not a single Republican supported Health Reform even though it was a Republican plan that had been implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. They pushed us to the edge of the fiscal cliff and got America’s credit rating downgraded.
Lowering the nation’s rating to one notch below AAA, the credit rating company said “political brinkmanship” in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances “less stable, less effective and less predictable.” It said the bipartisan agreement reached this week to find at least $2.1 trillion in budget savings “fell short” of what was necessary to tame the nation’s debt over time and predicted that leaders would not be likely to achieve more savings in the future.
They whine and complain that the economy is sluggish and blame Obama for that while ignoring that the economic crash started before he became President, that his efforts — against Republican obstruction — were crucial to bring America out of the recession and saving the American auto industry and our GDP growth is already stronger than most other nations who also went thru the same financial crisis.
The idea is that Obama is a failure, that’s he’s an alien, that he doesn’t belong, that he’s not one of us. That idea is a total complete lie, and it’s disgusting.
And now. as I type this, Trump just stated this on live TV at a event with Veterans.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign started the birther controversy. I finished it. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.
That’s just plain horseshit. Despicable, deplorable horseshit. This event went on for 20 minutes where he spent more time promoting his new undocumented worker built hotel and a set of veterans praising him, then on this subject. When exactly did he come to this miraculous conclusion, was it before or after he talked to Meredith Viera in 2011 or when he started his campaign, or talked to the Wapo last night? What finally convinced him? It’s completely insulting. He could’ve and should’ve said that five years ago. He should’ve said it seven years ago. This man is a scam artist and he and the GOP that has embraced him isn’t deserving of any respect what so ever.
Friday, Sep 16, 2016 · 4:09:40 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Wow Jake Tapper is Spot on.
“It’s hard to imagine this as anything other than a political Rick Roll,” he said, referring to the internet tradition of tricking people into clicking on the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” “We were told that this was going to be Donald Trump addressing something that his top campaign advisers, people in the Republican National Committee want him to address, and then clear up, and then stop talking about.”