The Trump Campaign’s Birther Statement is a Complete Fabrication

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:11 pm

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The Trump campaign has issued a statement on Trump’s position regarding President Barack Obama’s birth:

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.
 
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.
 
Mr. Trump is now totally focused on bringing jobs back to America, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, taking care of our veterans, introducing school choice opportunities and rebuilding and making our inner cities safe again.” – Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor

Hillary Clinton did not say that. The facts are, if the origins of birtherism are to be found in the 2008 political campaign, it is clear that neither Hillary Clinton nor any member of her campaign can be identified as spreading or endorsing that rumor.

And it cannot be denied that it was Donald Trump himself who, in 2011, made birtherism “a thing.”

In other words, this new Trump statement is, like everything else issuing from his campaign, a lie. A complete fabrication. Obama had already released his birth certificate – in 2008 – and Trump, far from forcing Obama to produce it, was busily claiming it wasn’t real.

Despite Miller’s claim made here that the issue of Obama’s birth was settled in 2011, in 2012 Trump used his tried and true “people tell me/that’s what I hear” routine to disregard the validity of that birth certificate:

And just this past August, Corey Lewandowski asked, “did he get in as a U.S. citizen, or was he brought into Harvard University as a citizen who wasn’t from this country?”

This statement is just another example of how Trump has done his level best to keep the issue of birtherism alive, by very judiciously talking about what he says he refuses to talk about.

As has been pointed out by The Boston Globe’s James Pindell, this is not a statement from Trump but from his communications director. Trump has already warned us to beware false Trump prophets, proclaiming in a tweet this past May,

“Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign. The only quote that matters is a quote from me!”

Needless to say, if you check Trump’s twitter feed, you will find complete silence on the subject of Obama’s birth.

So there you have it: like Trump’s medical history, a huge non-event that asks more questions than it answers, and which tells you absolutely nothing about Donald Trump.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.