WASHINGTON -- After five years questioning Barack Obama's birthplace, Donald Trump reversed course Friday and acknowledged the president was born in the U.S.
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"President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," Trump said, enunciating each word in a brief statement at the end of a campaign appearance. "Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again."
Trump made no apology for and took no questions after the statement.
But as the GOP presidential nominee put that conspiracy theory to rest, he stoked another, claiming that the "birther movement" was begun by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean," Trump said.
While the question of Obama's birthplace was pushed by some bloggers who backed Clinton's primary campaign against him eight years ago, Clinton has long denounced the conspiracy as a "racist lie."
"Trump has spent years peddling a racist conspiracy aimed at undermining the first African-American president," Clinton tweeted after his Friday event. "He can't just take it back."
Speaking to an audience of black women in Washington, Clinton denounced the "temerity" of Trump's campaign to make that assertion.
"He is feeding into the worst impulses, the bigotry and bias that lurks in our country," Clinton said. "Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple, and Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology."
Black members of Congress held a news conference at the Capitol to denounce Trump immediately after his appearance.
His statement on Friday, in a ballroom at his new Washington hotel, lasted only a few seconds after a lengthy campaign event featuring military officers and decorated veterans who have endorsed him. The major cable TV networks aired the full event live in anticipation of comments Trump had hyped hours before.
"I'm going to be making a major statement on this whole thing and what Hillary did," he told the Fox Business Network. "We have to keep the suspense going, OK?"
President Reacts
For years, Trump has been the most prominent proponent of the "birther" idea. He used the issue to build his political profile, earning him media attention and vaulting him to the front of Republican primary polls in 2011 as he considered running for president. He said that he had hired investigators and that they "cannot believe what they're finding."
But the topic remained a fringe issue within the Republican Party; in 2011, conservatives, including Ann Coulter, now a vocal Trump supporter, called on Trump to stop pursuing the issue.
The Trump campaign had given conflicting signals on the question of Obama's birthplace in recent weeks. Those connected with the campaign -- Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, Trump's running mate; Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager; and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump adviser -- all recently acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States.
Friday marked the first time Trump himself said in no uncertain terms he was wrong. As late as Wednesday, he refused to acknowledge Obama was born in Hawaii, declining to address the matter in a Washington Post interview published late Thursday.
"I'll answer that question at the right time," Trump said. "I just don't want to answer it yet."
Clinton also seized on the Trump interview during a speech Thursday night.
"This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?" she asked.
Hours later, Trump's campaign spokesman Jason Miller issued a statement that suggested the question had been settled five years ago -- by Trump.
"In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate," Miller said.
"Mr. Trump did a great service to the president and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised," he added.
But Trump repeatedly questioned Obama's birth in the years after the president released his birth certificate. In August 2012, for example, Trump was pushing the issue on Twitter.
"An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a fraud," he wrote.
Even in January of this year, Trump sounded skeptical when asked whether he now believed the president was a natural-born citizen.
"Who knows? Who cares right now? We're talking about something else, OK?" Trump said in a CNN interview. "I mean, I have my own theory on Obama. Someday I'll write a book."
Obama took the unprecedented step of releasing his long-form birth certificate in 2011, after persistent questions from Trump and others.
On the day he released the document, Obama jabbed at Trump, saying, "We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers."
The president on Friday added that he hoped the election would focus on more serious matters and that he "was pretty confident about where I was born."
In her speech in Washington on Friday to the Black Women's Agenda symposium workshop -- before Trump made his statement -- Clinton said that Trump owed Obama and the country an apology and that it was too late for him to walk back what he has done.
"For five years he has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president," Clinton said. "His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie."
She added, "There is no erasing it in history."
The Black Women's Agenda invited both candidates to address its annual conference, but the group's president said only Clinton had accepted.
After both Clinton and Trump spoke, her campaign released a statement calling Trump's remarks "disgraceful."
"After five years of pushing a racist conspiracy theory into the mainstream, it was appalling to watch Trump appoint himself the judge of whether the President of the United States is American," Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said. "This sickening display shows more than ever why Donald Trump is totally unfit be president."
First Lady Campaigns
Adding a new face to the current political fray, Michelle Obama on Friday warned young voters against being "tired or turned off" in the 2016 election. She urged them to rally behind Clinton, "particularly given the alternative."
Michelle Obama is emerging as one of Clinton's most effective advocates, especially with voters who backed her husband but are less enthusiastic about his potential Democratic successor.
Friday's rally in Virginia was Michelle Obama's first solo campaign event for Clinton and comes nearly two months after her turn at the Democratic convention. Speaking to mostly students at George Mason University, she repeatedly jabbed Trump without mentioning him by name, declaring that being president "isn't anything like reality TV."
The first lady pointedly called out those who continue to question the president's citizenship "up to this very day." Drawing on a frequently quoted line from her convention speech, Michelle Obama said her husband had responded to those questions by "going high when they go low."
She vouched repeatedly for Clinton's resume and character, urging voters motivated by her husband's history-making campaigns to feel the same way about the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. party.
"When I hear folks saying that they don't feel inspired in this election, well let me tell you, I disagree -- I am inspired," Michelle Obama said.
Also addressing the youth vote for Clinton was her primary rival, Bernie Sanders. At a Democratic rally in New Platz, N.Y., Sanders stressed that this isn't a year to vote third party.
Mentioning Clinton's name sparingly, Sanders told several hundred voters -- many still wearing gear from the Democratic primary -- that their votes could stop the election of a Republican "who thinks climate change is a hoax."
His comments were in reaction to Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson's candidacy, whose ads have called for challenging the two-party status quo.
"Our economic challenges will be conquered not by force, but by cooperation and mutual respect," Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, says in one of the ads. "For the independent majority of Americans who feel as I do, I say: Why wait one more day?"
Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, is gradually embracing a role as a critic of the third-party option. As Democrats contemplate ways to tamp down a protest vote for Johnson or for the Green Party's Jill Stein, Sanders is already arguing that anyone who voted for him would set the movement back by voting against Clinton.
In an interview after the rally, Sanders said that Democrats and the media need to focus on Clinton's actual policies more than they have been, in a campaign dominated by back-and-forths about Trump's gaffes.
"This is not the time for a protest vote, in terms of a presidential campaign," Sanders said. "I ran as a third-party candidate. I'm the longest-serving independent in the history of the United States Congress. I know more about third-party politics than anyone else in the Congress, OK? And if people want to run as third-party candidates, God bless them! Run for Congress. Run for governor. Run for state legislature."
He continued: "When we're talking about president of the United States, in my own personal view, this is not time for a protest vote. This is time to elect Hillary Clinton, and then work after the election to mobilize millions of people to make sure she can be the most progressive president she can be."
Both Johnson and Stein have not made overwhelming splashes in national polls.
As such, the commission that oversees presidential debates has invited only Clinton and Trump to the first presidential debate, set for Sept. 26.
The Commission on Presidential Debates said in a statement Friday that Johnson and Stein were polling too low to qualify for the event. The commission since 2000 has invited only candidates polling at 15 percent or above in an average of five polls. Johnson was at 8.4 percent and Stein at 3.2 percent.
Johnson and Stein could still qualify for the two remaining ones in October if their poll numbers hit 15 percent.
In a statement, Johnson slammed the commission as a tool of the Democratic and Republican parties and vowed to make the October contests.
Information for this article was contributed by Jill Colvin, Jonathan Lemire, Ken Thomas and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; by Maggie Haberman, Alan Rappeport, Nick Corasaniti, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Jonathan Martin of The New York Times; and by Anne Gearan, John Wagner and David Weigel of The Washington Post.
A Section on 09/17/2016