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Trump Quits 'Birtherism,' But Not Lying

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

News Flash: Donald Trump now believes that President Barack Obama was born in the country of which he is president.

That news may be a relief to the president, although I doubt that he was losing much sleep over it.

After a night of oddly competing statements from Trump and his own campaign team, the Republican presidential nominee's announced three things at his new Washington, D.C., hotel.

Two of those things were false. "Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy," he declared on Friday morning. "I finished it. I finished it."

No, there's no evidence that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with starting birtherism, as PolitiFact found in 2015.

But the bizarre "birther" movement was fading in 2011 when Trump, the TV star and real estate developer, gave it new life through his well-developed capacity for self-promotion.

 

And he hasn't finished it, either. Diehard birthers and other paranoids will believe what they want to believe, undeterred by anything so trivial as evidence or a lack of it.

Some folks still can't wrap their minds around the possibility that Americans actually elected a black president, even after the president seemed to put it to rest with his roast of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

Obama hilariously flashed his long-form birth certificate that night on a giant screen as Hulk Hogan's theme song, "(I am a) Real American," rocked the room.

Trump "can finally get back to the issues that matter," the president told the black-tie crowd that included an unsmiling Trump. "Like: did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And -- where are Biggie and Tupac?"

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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