One Trump lie down, but others remain
WASHINGTON: After five years of peddling a lie, stoking a rightwing conspiracy pushed by a section of Americans uncomfortable with a black man in the Oval Office, Donald Trump took the truth pill on Friday. But there are plenty of other, similar falsehoods he has deployed to further his short career in politics.
Trump was a leading face of the “birther movement”, which refers to fringe theorists who believe that President Barack Obama was not born in the US and is therefore ineligible for presidency. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and produced both a short-form and long-form certificate to prove that. But Trump continued to fan it.
Until Friday, when he finally accepted the reality. But there was no word about the another lie the Manhattan builder has flogged about Obama, that he was Muslim, like his Kenyan-born father, and not Christian, which he is.
“I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a mosque? Very sad that he did not go!” he tweeted in February.”
Trump has also tried to link Obama to Muslims, who had committed acts of terror in the US. “(Obama) doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,” he said of Obama after Omar Mateen, an American of Afghan descent, killed 47 people at a gay club in Orlando in June, adding, “It’s one or the other. And either one is unacceptable.”
He has fanned many conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health, insinuating she may be in worse condition than she or her campaign would let on. He tries to dog-whistle it saying she is low on stamina, while surrogates such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani have tried to fan using unsubstantiated claims on the internet. “Just Google it,” Giuliani said in a TV interview.
The businessman tycoon’s love of conspiracy theories has not spared even his own party colleagues, and during the Republican nominating contests, he suggested Ted Cruz’s father may have had some connection to former president John F Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He repeated it after Cruz refused to endorse the nominee at the party Cleveland convention.