Donald Trump’s campaign released a statement Thursday evening claiming the GOP nominee believes President Obama was born in the United States, though the Republican candidate still hasn’t said this himself.
“In 2011, Mr. Trump … successfully [compelled] President Obama to release his birth certificate,” Trump senior communications advisor Jason Miller said Thursday.
“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,” he said.
The statement from the Trump camp comes just a few hours after the Washington Post published an article Thursday evening titled “Trump bullish as poll numbers rise, won’t say Obama was born in United States.”
The Post reported:
In the interview, conducted late Wednesday aboard his private plane as it idled on the tarmac here, Trump suggested he is not eager to change his pitch or his positions even as he works to reach out to minority voters, many of whom are deeply offended by his long-refuted suggestion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
When asked whether his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was accurate when she said recently that he now believes Obama was born in this country, Trump responded: “It’s okay. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things.”
The Trump statement also took a swing at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and blamed her for being the first to raise questions about Obama’s birthplace.
“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,” Miller said.
The Post, however, has rated this claim false, and reported in 2008 that, “There’s no evidence to support Trump’s repeated claim that Clinton ‘started’ the birther movement and was one of the first to question Obama’s birth certificate.”
“He could blame the actions of Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 primary or say the rumor has some Democratic roots. But there’s no evidence that she or her campaign questioned his birth certificate or his citizenship,” the Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote.
Lee, like PolitiFact, conceded pro-Clinton Democrats appear to have participated in 2008 in whisper campaigns to cast doubt on Obama’s background. However, the fact-checkers stressed, there still doesn’t seem to be a direct link between the story and Clinton or her 2008 campaign.
CNN mostly concurred, but noted in May that though “Clinton herself never questioned Obama’s birth certificate,” she is still guilty of stoking “questions about Obama’s identity,” including the time in 2008 when members of her staff reportedly circulated old photos of Obama dressed in traditional African garments.
The statement released Thursday by the Trump camp is not the first time that a member his team has claimed on his behalf that he believes Obama was born an American citizen.
Conway said in a CNN interview on Sept. 9 that Trump believes the president was born in the United States.
“So he believes President Obama was born here,” Conway said. “He was born in Hawaii. … So he is born in the United States, there’s no question to me he was born in the United States, but he has not been a particularly successful president, and that’s what this campaign is about.”
Trump, who has openly indulged in theories alleging the commander in chief was born in Kenya, has yet to say himself he believes the president was born in the United States.
