Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump on Friday abandoned
his assertion that Barack Obama
was not born in the United States
after spending years promoting
conspiracy theories that the
country's first African-American
president started life as a foreigner.
But never one to let a controversy
go without fanning its flames,
Trump accused his Democratic rival
in the Nov. 8 election, Hillary
Clinton, of beginning the so-called
birther movement in her failed 2008
presidential campaign against
Obama, a claim that does not stand
up to scrutiny.
Trump, who has won back some
ground in opinion polls and made
the White House race competitive
again after he went through a
summer slump, made his
announcement in an attempt to
clear the air as he prepares for the
first of three presidential debates
with Clinton on Sept. 26.
"President Barack Obama was born
in the United States. Period," said
Trump. "Now we all want to get
back to making America strong and
great again," he said at an event at
a new Trump International Hotel
down the street from the White
House.
The New York businessman had
brought up the birther controversy
as far back as 2011 to make a mark
in American politics in a way that
would eventually prompt him to run
for office this year.
During his presidential campaign he
has readily trafficked in other
theories that are the stuff of
American supermarket tabloids,
such as declaring that the father of
Republican former rival Ted Cruz
might have been linked to the
assassin of the late President John
F. Kennedy.
In making his announcement,
Trump advanced a widely debunked
claim that Clinton and her 2008
campaign had been the original
birthers.
"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of
2008 started the birther
controversy. I finished it. You know
what I mean," he said.
His campaign directed reporters to
a 2007 memo from then-Clinton
adviser Mark Penn, who had
encouraged the Clinton campaign to
go negative against Obama by
saying that his Hawaiian birth and
boyhood in Indonesia gave him
limited roots in American values
and culture.
Penn eventually left the Clinton
campaign and his advice was never
acted upon.
"A NEW LIE"
The Democratic National Committee
condemned Trump's bid to link
Clinton to the birther idea. "He had
the audacity to spout a new lie
about the birther movement that he
helped to build," it said.
Clinton on Friday demanded Trump
apologize to the president for
having helped spread the birther
idea and said Trump had tried to
"delegitimize our first black
president."
"His campaign was founded on this
outrageous lie. There is no erasing
it in history," Clinton said in an
address to the Black Women's
Association in Washington.
Obama, who produced his Hawaiian
birth certificate in 2011 to prove
doubters wrong, had famously
mocked Trump over the birther
issue at a White House
Correspondents Association dinner
as the wealthy businessman sat in
the audience fuming.
Still Trump clung to the notion that
Obama was foreign-born, saying in
2012 that the birth certificate was a
fraud.
On Friday, Obama was asked for his
reaction to the latest Trump
declaration.
"I'm shocked that a question like
that has come up at a time when
we have so many other things to
do. Well, I'm not that shocked
actually. It's fairly typical. We've
got other things to attend to. I was
pretty confident about where I was
born," he said.
The birther conspiracies, which aim
to challenge the legality of Obama's
presidency, incense black
Americans whose votes Trump has
been trying to court.
Members of the Congressional
Black Caucus held a news
conference to urge African-
American voters to resist any
temptation to support Trump.
"I'm wondering when this country is
going to awaken from this reality
show," said Representative Brenda
Lawrence, a Democrat.
The issue has not been a factor in
the campaign for this year's
presidential election, but it
resurfaced in recent days, taking
the focus of Trump's campaign
away from topics such as
immigration, trade and the
economy, which he has been using
to hit Clinton.
Trump had revived the birther
controversy on Thursday in an
interview with The Washington Post
when he declined to say whether he
believed Obama was born in
Hawaii. A U.S. president must be a
natural-born citizen.
Trump had promised "a big
announcement" about the birther
issue on Friday, giving the
impression it was the purpose of
the event at his hotel.
But, instead, he held off saying
anything about it through more than
20 minutes of endorsements from
military veterans. Only after that did
Trump make a brief statement about
Obama's birth.
Trump, a real estate mogul, devoted
more time at the beginning of the
event to talking about his hotel
where the event took place. He
ignored reporters' shouted
questions.
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