How Trump’s ‘birther’ claims helped to stir presidential bid
Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald Trump, told Farah he shared his suspicion that President Barack Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
Farah recalled that Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.
Trump’s eagerness to embrace the birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to rightwing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.
“The appeal of the birther issue was, ‘I’m going to take this guy on, and I’m going to beat him,’” said Sam Nunberg, who was one of Trump’s advisers during that period but was fired from his current campaign. “It was a great niche and wedge issue.”
And starting in March 2011, when he first began to test the idea that a reality television star with no political experience could mount a campaign for the presidency, Trump could not stop talking about it.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked on ABC’s “The View.” “I want to see his birth certificate,” he told Fox News’ “On the Record.” And on NBC’s “Today Show,” he declared, “I’m starting to think that he was not born here.”
The more Trump questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency, the better he performed in the early polls of the 2012 Republican field, springing from fifth place to a virtual tie for first.
That frenzied period culminated six weeks after it began in a surreal televised split screen between Trump and the White House briefing room, where aides released an image of the president’s birth certificate proving he was born in Honolulu and Obama directly addressed the issue.
It was a remarkable moment that Trump celebrated as a political victory.
Then Trump did something decidedly un-Trump like: He dropped the issue and rarely spoke of it publicly again.
According to people apprised of the conversations, people close to him had been worried about the negative attention. Officials at NBC also had been concerned that he was alienating the large black audience of his hit show, “The Apprentice.”
Indeed, damage already had been done. Some black leaders denounced him, with Jesse Jackson accusing Trump of appealing to the president’s detractors with “coded and covert rhetoric for stirring up racial fears.”
Several days later, Obama relished his own chance to belittle Trump with a string of taunts at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as Trump, seated in the audience, grew increasingly stone-faced. “But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” he said to laughter. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing?”
Trump, who declined to be interviewed about the subject, was not the first to question Obama’s birthplace. The narrative that Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother American, might not meet the requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen” first arose during his 2008 bid.
Obama’s aides initially decided it was better to ignore the questions; addressing them, they reasoned, would just given them credibility.
And Trump, too, at first seemed uncertain about just how much skepticism to express over the president’s place of birth.
“The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him,” he said in a March 2011 interview. “The whole thing is very strange.”
Yet, quickly, the world took notice. One headline referred to Trump going “Birther Lite.” Another said he was a “Teeny Bit Birther.” And MSNBC’s “Hardball” replayed the comments, with the intro: “Let’s listen to how he joins the birthers.”
If Trump was offering a political trial balloon, he appeared to like the results. He started making the rounds, offering interviews on the topic and stoking public interest in the birther claims.
The White House had growing concerns. Once reserved to the fringe, the issue had now begun popping up at town-hallstyle events around the country.
The turning point came in mid-April 2011, when the president delivered a major speech on the budget, only to find his remarks obscured by questions about his birth certificate.
“It was basically a message blocker that was preventing us from talking about the issues we needed to talk about because the press was chasing Donald Trump around for the next crazy thing he was going to say,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director then.
The White House counsel dispatched someone to Hawaii to find the president’s original long-form birth certificate from 1961. (Years before, the president had released the “short form,” an official computer-generated document that contains the information from the original.) With the document finally in hand, aides quickly scheduled a news conference.
They worried that having Obama himself release his birth certificate from the White House briefing room would undermine the dignity of the office. So they first passed out copies to reporters, and then had the president deliver remarks, in which he warned the nation about getting distracted by “sideshows and carnival barkers.”
Then, almost as quickly as it began, the controversy subsided. And several weeks later, Trump decided not to seek the Republican nomination. Though he continued to do well in polls, he seemed to be more focused on his reality television pursuits.
Now, Trump almost assiduously refuses to discuss the topic, which, according to several people close to him, was always more about political performance art than ideology.
“I don’t talk about that anymore,” Trump told MSNBC host Chris Matthews after a Republican debate last year.
Raising questions about the president’s birth certificate — and even threatening to send a team of investigators to Hawaii — had served its purpose, raising Trump’s political profile and, whether he knew it or not at the time, providing him with the rudimentary foundation upon which he built his 2016 campaign.