September 15, 2016

Earlier Thursday, Donald Trump gave an interview to the Washington Post's Robert Costa where he once again refused to admit that he was wrong to question President Obama's birthplace, claiming he would address it when the time was right.

That got a lot of play on cable tonight, especially after Hillary Clinton specifically called him out for it in her speech tonight at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala, where she slammed him for still trying to delegitimize our first African-American president.

She said "He was asked one more time, ‘Where was President Obama born?’ And he still wouldn’t still say ‘Hawaii.’ He still wouldn’t say ‘America.’ This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?"

Not any time soon. After her speech, his campaign issued a statement which said this:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.

In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

As Mother Jones' reporter Tim Murphy observes, nearly every word of this statement is a lie.

We have debunked every claim in that statement several times over, but the worst part of it is the attempt to paper over Trump's bigotry and birtherism with a campaign statement.

As Brianna Keilar says in the clip at the top, it didn't come from Trump, but from his campaign. And Trump himself has warned everyone not to believe anything from his campaign as recently as May, 2016.

Let's take a walk down memory lane, courtesy of the Twitter Addict Trump, who just can't resist. The campaign claims he gave up the birtherism in 2011 after President Obama produced his long form birth certificate, but here is Trump, in his own tweeted words in 2012:

Also from 2012:

Where he slyly intimates that the President had someone killed as part of the conspiracy in 2013:

2014:

Also in 2014:

We get the point. The man has never abandoned his efforts to delegitimize the President.

Apparently some in the campaign who are not Trump have some frustrations.

And some reporters, like Brianna Keilar in the video above, also have frustrations:

To conclude: Trump has admitted nothing; his campaign is pulling a sleight-of-hand effort to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, and he has no intention whatsoever of alienating his bigoted, deplorable base.

President Obama's former speechwriter Jon Favreau:

Finally, this is all a way of getting us to talk about HIM instead of Hillary's splendid speech tonight, which truly was one of her best. In the closing days of her campaign, she will focus on children and families and deliver a positive, more hopeful message than Cheeto-face could ever hope to do.

Until Donald Trump forms the words with his own mouth that President Obama was born in the United States, and until he issues a sincere apology to him for his racist attempts to delegitimize him, Trump is a birther.

And because he is incapable of doing that, Donald Trump will always be the Birther-in-Chief. He cannot admit he was wrong. Ever.

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