Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:03 pm
Watch Donald Trump absolutely lose his mind in an birther frenzy just hours before he is set to appear at a fundraiser with Mitt Romney.
Video from CNBC:
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Transcript:
CNBC: Just to quick switch topics on you, I want to go back to the birther stuff. You were fanning the flames last week. Are you back in the same place where you were before?
Trump: I never really changed. Nothing’s changed my mind. You have a huge group of people. I walk down the street and people are screaming please a publisher came out last week and had a statement about a young man doing a book, born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. The publisher came out and said we made a mistake. What do we do? Oh, we made a mistake. That’s not the way life works. He’s a young man doing a book and he said what he believed to be the truth. So there are a whole lot of things. His mother was never in the hospital, they don’t know which hospital it was, his grandmother said he was born in Kenya. It all wouldn’t matter except if you’re born in a foreign country, you’re not allowed to be president so this is a minor detail. So the publisher comes out last week and made this statement and said we made a mistake. Is it an important thing? In a way it is because it says you’re not allowed to be president if you’re not from the country. I’m not fanning flames.
This is something that came out last week; a lot of people are questioning his birth certificate, questioning the authenticity of his birth certificate. I’ve been known as being a very smart guy for a long time. I don’t consider myself birther or not birther but there are some major questions here and the press just refuses to cover it. Now, if that were somebody else, they’d be covering it and throwing people out of office but they don’t want to cover it. So, it’s interesting. there is a weird — in that same report that was on some of the conservative web sites and I haven’t even confirmed it, Donald, but there was a quote from one of his debates when he was running for state senator, I believe and one of his opponents said, well, this was at the time when the Kenya thing was still on some of his biographies or something and the guy said you went money born here, he said it doesn’t matter if I’m born here, I wasn’t running for president at the time — there was a quote. From him. But the question is whether there was a time in his life where he thought it was more attractive to be a more national type guy and maybe didn’t change the impression that he wasn’t.
I don’t know. Joe, just to finish off, a lot of people want to see his college transcripts. They’re not looking at his marks, his grade, was he a good student. They want to see what they say about place of birth. Those transcripts have disappeared. Nobody seems to be able to get them. I was able to get him to produce a birth certificate, if it was a correct birth certificate. A lot of people have very serious doubts. They want to see his college transcripts because they want to see what he is saying about place of birth. What did he say? Well, he is really stone walling it, to use an old Nixon term, he is really stone walling it when it comes to — he just doesn’t want to give those transcripts. What does he say at Columbia and Harvard and his other college where he supposedly did not get good marks and got into Columbia. What does he say about place of birth? One other thing, the hospital. The mother was never in the hospital. These are minor details but they can’t find any records that the mother was in the hospital. So it’s a tough situation.
Trump’s birther rant came not even 24 hours after Romney reaffirmed his support for the reality television host. Romney said, “You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1 percent or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”
The question is how much longer can the Romney campaign play blind, deaf can, and dumb in the face of Trump’s birtherism? Even worse, Donald Trump’s little mental choo-choo went off the tracks just hours before Romney and Trump will appear together at a fundraiser in Las Vegas. Birthers make up a majority of Republican primary voters, but only 13%-17% of Americans believe Obama was not born in the United States. The number of birthers has been sliced almost in half since Obama released his birth certificate.
The reality is that Romney has no chance of moving back to the middle as long as he keeps hanging around with Donald Trump. The Romney folks may think they have found a clever way to use Trump to play to the far right, but all they are doing is costing themselves votes in November. No one is going to believe that birther Mitt and his unholy harem of sister wives is a mad of moderation who can lead this country.
The more Trump talks, the more votes he hands to President Obama in November.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
