No absolution for Trump on birtherism
Donald Trump can’t get a pass at this point on his birtherism.
Trump’s embrace of birtherism is what propelled him to political prominence, making him a hero to the far-right seeking to drive their fringe views into the mainstream.
“[H]e could have been born in Kenya and gone over to the United States. Everybody wants to be a U.S. citizen, and his grandparents put an ad in saying he was born in the United States because of all the benefits you get from being born in the United States,” Trump told a national audience on CNN in April 2011.
But now, his campaign is desperately trying to backtrack — saying that, beginning in 2011, Trump came to believe that Obama was born in the United States…
But there’s a problem. Just hours earlier, Trump told the Washington Post to ignore comments from his campaign about his views on birtherism…
Trump also appears poised, as his campaign statement does, to pin the birther conspiracy theory on Hillary Clinton. This claim has also been definitively debunked.
A last-minute conversion does not erase this ugly history.