On Sunday, Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying things that weren’t true about Donald Trump’s birtherist lies. “After the President presented his birth certificate, Donald has said, ‘You know, he was born in the United States and that’s the end of the issue.’ It was a contentious issue,” Christie said. Jake Tapper, the host, corrected him. “As a point of fact, Donald Trump did not accept when Barack Obama released his birth certificate in 2011. He kept up this whole birther thing until Friday.” Tapper was right to call Christie on that falsehood; some of Trump’s lowest insinuations about the President’s citizenship have occurred not only in the past few years but in recent months. Efforts to deal with that fallacy, however, have somehow, in the past few days, allowed another Trump lie to solidify: the idea that the President somehow didn’t release his birth certificate until 2011. In fact, Obama released his birth certificate in June, 2008. His campaign posted it online. Reporters were allowed to hold it and examine its embossed state seal and signature stamp. It showed that he had been born in Honolulu, on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 P.M. Hawaiian officials attested to its accuracy. That there were any questions after that point is, in itself, a scandal. Indeed, that there were any questions before that point is outrageous. Candidates who say that they were born in the United States are generally not faced with nervous glances and requests to prove it. But Obama was, and, in 2008, he did prove it.

And yet, two and a half years after Obama released his birth certificate, Donald Trump began pushing the case that the birth certificate was not a birth certificate. In part, this was because instead of saying “birth certificate” on top, it said “certification of live birth” and it was a printout of a computer record, rather than something bearing the scrawl of an obstetrician. That is what Hawaiian birth certificates look like; this was, unambiguously, a Hawaiian state birth certificate. If Obama’s document didn’t offer actual proof of his birth, then pretty much anyone born in Hawaii who had used a birth certificate to obtain a driver’s license or passport had done so under false pretenses. But in Donald Trump’s world, anything that doesn’t look the way you would expect it to in a cartoon is open to doubt. He managed to animate conspiracy theories about the “real” birth certificate—the documentation, pasted into a bound volume in the Hawaiian state archives, that is the basis for the state certificate and that, under state law, is not released—and about how either it didn’t exist or else revealed some secret about Obama. “Maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump said on Fox News, in March, 2011, as if the doctor who delivered the infant future President might have detected some religious leanings in his first baby noises.

It is worth noting that for there to have been any sort of discrepancy between the certification and the certificate, multiple Hawaiian officials would have to have been involved in a fraud. (So would the editors of the two Hawaiian newspapers in which Obama’s birth was announced, in 1961, a move that would have required not only conspiring journalists but ones equipped with psychic powers or a time machine—and probably both.) Then again, polls in 2011 showed that a certain number of birthers accepted that Obama was born in Hawaii; they just didn’t believe that Hawaii was part of the United States. And who can believe what foreign bureaucrats certify?

Somehow, this nonsense became a cause célèbre in early 2011. Perhaps it was a media failure, although conservative media outlets might consider it a success. (And a shameful one.) Obama, wanting to be done with it, had his lawyers apply for a waiver under Hawaiian law to release the other, archival certificate. Hawaiian officials granted it. Obama’s personal lawyer had to get on a plane to Hawaii and pick up a certified copy of the piece of paper in the bound volume; the copying itself was personally overseen by the director of Hawaii’s Department of Health. The White House gave it to the press on April 27, 2011. It said that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 P.M. This version did have the sprawling signature of the obstetrician, Dr. David Sinclair. (This was gratifying to the doctor’s family in Hawaii, who had not been aware that he’d delivered a future President; his widow said that her daughter-in-law called at six in the morning and said, “Mom, you’ve got to go on TV!” She did.) For added color, it showed Obama’s mother’s full home address in Honolulu (the same one listed in the contemporaneous birth announcements) and the name of the hospital, which was not news, either. It had no more information relevant to the Americanness of the President’s American birth than his other birth certificate had—and, for that matter, nothing that put into question anything he had ever said about himself. That any information about Obama’s birth was ever in any way lacking had always been a race-baiting fabrication. It still is.

Trump spreads lies the way terrorists plant bombs: one goes off, and when the first responders rush in, there’s a second, or even a third. The main collateral blast when he spoke about birtherism last Friday, at his new hotel in Washington, D.C., was that “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.” They did not, as my colleague John Cassidy and others documented over the weekend. Trump continued, “I finished it. I finished it—you know what I mean.” Many reports indicated that they did know what he meant, or was mendaciously referring to: “his public pressure campaign in 2011 that resulted in Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii,” as Politico put it—as if that act added information about anything but Trump’s ambitions. The Times noted that “Mr. Trump’s spokesman, Jason Miller, asserted—also falsely—that Mr. Trump had ‘obtained’ Mr. Obama’s birth certificate. The president actually released the long-form version in 2011.” A Times editorial left out the long-form qualification, saying that “Mr. Trump continued to heap doubt on President Obama’s birth certificate even after it was released,” linking to a story about the 2011 release. It is, again, important to say that Trump is lying even on his own terms. But those terms are a lie, too. This is a rhetorical trap, one that even Tim Kaine, the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, stumbled into when he was asked to address an allegation that Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton associate, raised birtherist questions during the 2008 primary. (Blumenthal has denied it.) “Whatever Sidney Blumenthal thought in 2008, by 2011, it was absolutely crystal clear that President Obama was a citizen, because his birth certificate had been released,” Kaine said. It is, again, necessary to address the bald lie in Trump’s claim that he “finished” anything in 2011. But one can’t forget the bigotry built into the way he got started.

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said, on the day in 2011 when reporters got the copy of the second, bonus birth certificate. “We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do.” Last week, when Donald Trump said for the first time that Obama was born in the United States, the President, quite rightly, declined to act gratified. No one needs to say thank you to Trump.