USA TODAY International Edition
Trump’s ‘ birther’ reversal replaces one lie with another
In 36 seconds Friday, Donald Trump tried to vanquish a lie he has perpetrated for several years, namely that Barack Obama might not have been born in the United States and, by extension, was never legitimately president.
Trump touted this crackpot theory in 2011 when he flirted with running for president, and he never backed away from it. Never, that is, until Friday, when he finally conceded at a campaign event that “President Obama was born in the United States. Period.”
Trump deserves about as much credit for this ridiculously belated admission as he should get for declaring that the Earth is round or that the pope is Catholic. A true apology is in order, as is a fuller explanation of when and how Trump got in touch with reality.
But that is not what he or his supporters produced over the weekend. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for instance, argued on CNN Sunday that by not repeating the lie during his campaign — but never correcting it — Trump had essentially made the issue moot.
Campaign director Kellyanne Conway, on Fox News Sunday, repeated Trump’s latest absurdity — that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and not he himself, had been responsible for the birther argument.
To be clear, there is no evidence that Clinton or anyone on her campaign ever publicly questioned Obama’s citizenship. Conway speciously cited a memo written during Clinton’s primary contest with Obama in 2007 in which an aide suggested that Clinton contrast her Illinois childhood with Obama’s more exotic upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia.
In pursuing this line, Trump is not correcting a lie. He is merely replacing it with another.
Trump’s bizarre “birther” claims, which played out on cable television during much of 2011, not only sought to undermine the legitimacy of the first AfricanAmerican president, they breathed life into a radical, bigoted fringe in America that could never abide such an election result. Many elements of that same fringe are some of Trump’s most ardent supporters.
But the Republican presidential nominee clearly faced a conundrum before stepping to the podium on Friday. With Obama’s approval rating above 50%, and with Trump trying to broaden his appeal, he was eager to put this messy birther business behind him as the presidential race narrows.
He has not done that. If anything, he has merely brought new attention to his extreme difficulty in uttering things that are true.
Even so, for a candidate who takes pride in never admitting error, perhaps Trump’s concession Friday opens the door for him to come clean on some of his other whoppers in the 50 days until the election.
He could finally abandon his claim that human- caused climate change is a “hoax.” He could own up to the fact that he was for the Iraq War before he was against it. He could admit that he never saw video of thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/ 11 attacks.
So many lies, so little time.