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Yet the one true thing Trump said about the issue on Friday was his concession that, "President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period." He left the podium without taking questions. The issue had served its purpose. Now after years of feeding hate and suspicion, Trump was eager to move on.

In a private August email among others that hackers recently leaked, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the uncensored truth:

"Yup, the whole birther movement was racist," Powell, a Republican who endorsed Obama, wrote. "That's what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn't keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. ... As I have said before, 'What if he was?' Muslims are born as Americans every day."

Responsible leaders in our very diverse society know they face a choice with their appeals to communities undergoing economic and demographic change: They can try to calm public fears and anxieties or they can try to exploit them to win votes.

Having benefitted from his divide-and-conquer strategy, Trump has been reluctant to leave it, even as he tries to broaden his appeal to skeptical Republicans and independent swing voters who don't want to be associated with such other questionable Trump fans as David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and current Senate candidate in Louisiana.

The night before Trump conceded that Obama really is a natural-born citizen, his campaign issued a statement through spokesman Jason Miller saying, "Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States."

Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has been saying the same in recent weeks. But why not Trump himself?

A few hours before Miller's statement, Trump had awkwardly dodged the question of Obama's birth after it was put to him by the Washington Post's Robert Costa in Ohio. "I'll answer the question at the right time," Trump told Costa. "I just don't want to answer it yet."

Maybe he had to sleep on it. Even after Trump surrogate Ben Carson had said Trump should apologize to black Americans for the birther business, The Donald was slow to let it go.

Polls offer a big reason why. A mid-summer NBC News/Survey Monkey poll, for example, found that 80 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that "Barack Obama was born in the United States," while 41 percent of Republicans disagreed with it.

Are they in the "basket of deplorables" that Clinton recently -- and controversially -- identified as a major portion of Trump's voters? Of course, every Trump supporter is not a racist. But, if the shoe fits, wear it.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

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