Donald Trump, who for years has run a controversial campaign that President Barack Obama is not a born American, on Friday finally acknowledged that the country’s first black president was indeed born in the United States.
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period,” Trump said in an all-too-brief statement that claimed it was not he, but Hillary Clinton and her 2008 presidential campaign who started the “birther controversy”, adding: “I finished it.”
Without elaborating on the subject or taking questions from the media, Trump said: “Now we all have to get back to making America strong and great again.”
Trump’s statement aims to set at rest a major controversy that has dogged him for the past several years, antagonizing the African-American community whose votes he now needs badly in what is turning out to be a tight presidential race.
The Trump allegation of the Clinton campaign’s involvement in the birther controversy, raised several times in the past, has been repeatedly challenged and debunked not only by Clinton associates but media outlets carrying out their own fact checks.
The Trump statement came barely 12 hours after Clinton attacked Trump at a public event for still not having admitted that Obama was a born American citizen. She also tweeted: “President Obama’s successor cannot and will not be the man who led the racist birther movement. Period.”
Seizing on Trump’s refusal to admit that Obama was born in the US when asked about it during an interview to The Washington Post on Thursday, Clinton said: “He was asked one more time where was President Obama born and he still wouldn’t say Hawaii. He still wouldn’t say America. This man wants to be our next presidentIJ When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotryIJ”
Setting the stage for Trump’s course correction, his campaign put out a statement late on Thursday night, saying: “Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate (in 2011) when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.”
As Trump alleged, his campaign statement asserted that it was not Trump but Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign which first raised the Obama citizenship issue “to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President”.
The statement claimed that it was Trump who 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,” it said.