What Donald Trump popularized as a Big Lie--the birther myth about President Barack Obama--is now a shibboleth among his followers and many Republicans. It matters not a whit that Trump has finally, for blatant political purposes, admitted that the president was born in the United States; large numbers of his partisans, and of Republicans generally, still don't believe Obama has a legitimate claim to the office he has held for nearly eight years.
Now Trump says falsely that Hillary Clinton was the originator of birtherism? GOP officials say so, too.
Starting in the spring of 2011, as he weighed a possible presidential campaign in 2012, Trump appropriated what had been a fringe conspiracy theory, claiming that "I have people" who had investigated the provenance of Obama's birth certificate, and "they cannot believe what they're finding." Later Trump suggested the president's supposed motive for not releasing his so-called long-form birth certificate--he had already released an official Hawaii certification of live birth--was to conceal his religion. "Maybe it says he's a Muslim,"he said.
Birth certificates do not classify people by religion, and the president is Christian. No matter: Trump kept up his birther blather, saying that it "made me very popular," and helped to revive the sagging ratings of his TV show.
Now, having clarified that Obama was, in fact, born in the United States, Trump could render a further service by retracting various other frauds he has perpetrated in the course of this campaign. He could start by acknowledging there is no evidence he opposed the Iraq War before it started in March 2003, as he has claimed repeatedly. He could drop the ludicrous suggestion that Obama's best-selling autobiography, Dreams From My Father, was written by the onetime radical activist Bill Ayers. He could take back his racially incendiary and wildly inaccurate assertion that 81 percent of white homicide victims are killed by blacks. And that's just for starters.
Editorial on 09/21/2016