President Obama was born in the US, ‘period’, says Trump

QUESTIONING ELIGIBILITY Trump was a leader of ‘birther’ movement that claimed president was born outside US

WASHINGTON: After years of seeding and stoking baseless rightwing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth, Republican nominee Donald Trump has finally acknowledged the president was born in the US.

“President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period,” Trump said on Friday, adding that he just “finished” the “birther” movement, a name given to a group of people pushing the falsehood that Obama was not born on US soil — for the record, he was, in Hawaii — and was thus not qualified to be the president.

But as Trump sought to put that false conspiracy theory to rest, he stoked another, claiming that the “birther movement” was started by rival Hillary Clinton. There is no evidence that is true.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” said Trump .

After avoiding the issue for most of his campaign, Trump brought it back into focus avoiding a direct answer to a question in an interview to The Washington Post published on Thursday. “I’ll answer that question at the right time. I just don’t want to answer it yet.” His campaign, however, said later that he did believe the president was born in the US. But it was still not from Trump directly. Not until Friday morning, when he finally abandoned his bizarre project at his newly inaugurated hotel in Washington DC, just a few miles from the White House.

A statement issued earlier by his campaign spokesman Jason Miller had sought to portray Trump as “a closer” who helped “bring this ugly incident (about the president’s birth) to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate” in 2011.

But Trump didn’t give up even then, and continued to flog the lie, until Friday morning, shortly after Clinton attacked him for leading a movement for five years to “delegitimize our first black president”.

The president himself joined in also. “I was pretty confident about where I was born,” he told reporters auth the White House. “I think most people were as well. My hope would be that the presidential election reflects more serious issues than that.”

I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO, SAYS OBAMA

A few hours before Trump’s announcement, Obama said he had better things to do than comment on Republican presidential candidate’s announcement about the so-called birther question over Obama’s citizenship.

“I’m shocked that a question like that would come up at a time when we’ve got so many other things to do - well, I’m not that shocked actually,” Obama told reporters.

“I was pretty confident about where I was born. I think most people were as well,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office, where he was meeting about a trade deal with Asia.