President Barack Obama ignored an outreach effort by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to try and inject civility into the political process, as the new commander-in-chief faced a rising chorus of racially-tinged “birther” charges.

The 2009 episode, reported in Tim Alberta’s American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, came as the new Democratic president increasingly confronted spurious birther claims — the lie that he hadn’t been born in the United States and was ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief.