Trump’s birtherism changes targets
Where and how did birtherism start? Not, certainly, with Hillary Clinton, no matter what Donald Trump says. For that matter, birtherism did not even originate with the specific false accusation, or calumny, that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii or had failed to produce a birth certificate. That allegation merely advanced the story line on the overarching calumny that began percolating in 2004 after Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — namely that Obama was concealing Muslim origins.
What is calumny? The use of false accusations to destroy someone’s reputation for the sake of securing victory over them. Calumny was long held to be a mortal sin, because it is the most devious form of combat. Honorable combat does not rely on duplicity.
Where did this calumny against Obama, which led eventually to birtherism, come from?
Perennial political candidate, sender of nasty emails and launcher of frivolous suits Andy Martin put out an Aug. 10, 2004, press release in which he wrote: “I feel sad having to expose Barack Obama but the man is a complete fraud. The truth is going to surprise, and disappoint, and outrage many people who were drawn to him. He has lied to the American people, and he has sought to misrepresent his own heritage.”
Obama was said to be hiding or misrepresenting, specifically, a Muslim heritage. As Obama’s political trajectory began to rise, the rumors took off. By late 2007, it was common to find bloggers churning out the false allegations. A blogger from Boston called Beckwith wrote that Obama is “by birth, blood and training, a Muslim.” On a San Diego radio show in January 2008, Beckwith said Obama’s “relationship to Islam is the big question. When one investigates the background of Obama’s conversion, I can find no record of his baptism.”
Many who voted in the 2008 election will remember the wide circulation of emails that began with the subject line “Be Careful, Be Very Very Careful” and then went on to articulate the calumniating narrative against Obama.
The effort to turn Obama into a Muslim Manchurian candidate, as much a slur against American Muslims as against Obama, is the original source of birtherism. The specific false allegation that Obama was not born in Hawaii was just another crank of the narrative wheel, an embellishment, not a new story line.
The original source of this “Muslim Manchurian candidate” narrative was a combination of the likes of Andy Martin, right-wing bloggers like Beckwith and Ted Sampley, and microbloggers using the Free Republic website. That is where the earliest versions of the calumniating email emerged to public light in January 2007, shortly before Obama’s February 2007 announcement of his presidential bid. Sampley, who died in 2009, was also instrumental in racebaiting attacks on John McCain in 2000 and the Swiftboat attacks on John Kerry in 2004.
In January 2007, still before Obama’s formal announcement of his candidacy, Insight, a conservative Web magazine owned by the Unification Church, published a story alleging that the Clinton camp was questioning Obama’s heritage. Fox News picked up the story, but it was brought to an end via refutation by CNN on Jan. 23, 2007. Later that year, unauthorized Clinton staffers did circulate the “Obama is a Muslim” email and were repudiated by the campaign. Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle told the New York Times, “This was wholly unauthorized, and we were totally unaware of it; Let me be clear: No one should be engaging in this.” When Clinton supporters circulated the email, they were just the most minor of contributors to a massive effort to calumniate Obama. The real origins and force of that effort came from the right.
Where does that leave us? In 2011, Trump reignited an issue that should have been long dead. He recognized that calumniating the president’s origins could move the needle on poll numbers. And he has kept that calumny alive ever since.
On Friday, Trump finally publicly acknowledged that Obama is born in the United States, but, more important, he refused to relinquish his project of calumny. After all, Obama is no longer his enemy. Clinton is. So he refocused his calumniating attack of false accusations on her: She, he falsely alleged, started birtherism.
By pivoting from a use of birtherism to calumniate the president to using it to calumniate his opponent, Trump reveals the truth about himself. He is a liar. Worse, he lies to harm. When a lie no longer serves his interest, he is willing to abandon it. But only to repurpose it against his current target.
All that has changed with Trump’s birther calumny is who his enemy is. It’s no longer Obama but is now Clinton. Birtherism isn’t dead; it just has a new target.
A vote for Trump is a vote for the Calumniator in Chief.