Donald Trump’s campaign spokesman says the Republican presidential candidate now believes US President Barack Obama was born in the US, despite the candidate’s repeated refusal to say so himself.
In a statement released late on Thursday night, campaign spokesman Jason Miller claimed Trump “did a great service to the country” by bringing closure to an “ugly incident” that Trump, in fact, fueled.
“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,” Miller said.
Photo: AFP
“Mr Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure” to the issue, he added. “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.”
Trump was, for many years, the most prominent proponent of the “birther” movement, which claimed Obama was born outside the US and thus ineligible to be president — despite the fact that he was born in Hawaii.
Trump’s comments were seen by many as an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president and have turned off many of the African-American voters he is now courting in his bid for the White House.
The statement came after an interview published by the Washington Post in which Trump again declined to say whether he believed Obama was born on US soil.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump told the Post. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
Asked by the Post whether his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was accurate when she said in a television interview that her boss now believes the president was born in the US, Trump responded: “It’s OK. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things.”
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton seized on Trump’s refusal during a speech on Thursday night before the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
“He was asked one more time where was President Obama born and he still wouldn’t say Hawaii. He still wouldn’t say America,” Clinton said. “This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?”
While Miller’s statement suggests that Trump has believed the president was born in the US since seeing his birth certificate, the candidate has repeatedly stoked the issue in the years since.
In August 2012 — more than a year after the president released the document in April 2011 — Trump was pushing the issue on Twitter.
“An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud,” Trump wrote.
Trump has said repeatedly during the campaign that he no longer talks about the “birther” issue, but has refused to retract his previous comments, despite numerous opportunities. Instead, he has described the issue as an inconvenience.
“I don’t talk about it because if I talk about that, your whole thing will be about that,” Trump told reporters last week. “So I don’t talk about it.”
The statement from Trump’s spokesman also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Clinton launched the birther movement during her unsuccessful primary run against Obama in 2008.
“Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President,” the statement said. “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.”
Clinton has long denied the claim.
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