Hillary Clinton demanded Sunday evening that Donald Trump apologize for his years-long embrace of theories alleging President Obama was not born in the United States.
“He never apologizes for anything to anyone,” the Democratic nominee said during the second presidential debate, which was held at Washington University in St. Louis.
“He never apologized for the racist lie that President Obama was not born in the United States of America,” Clinton said. “He owes the president an apology. He owes our country an apology and he needs to take responsibility for his actions and his words.”
Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., have focused recently on Trump’s embracing of birtherism, arguing at length that conspiracies alleging the president was born in Kenya are motivated entirely by racism.
“[Trump] has pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States,” the Virginia senator said last week during the vice presidential debate, which was held at Longwood University in Farmville, Va.
“It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States,” Kaine said. “And I can’t imagine how Gov. Pence can defend the insult-driven, selfish, me-first-style of Donald Trump.”
The senator added later in the debate that birtherism is an “outrageous and bigoted lie.”
Trump backed away from his embrace of birtherism during an address last month at his new hotel in Washington, D.C., and stated that he believes Obama was born in the United States.
However, the Clinton campaign said Trump’s attempt to disown the issue isn’t good enough, and the Democratic nominee and her team have kept after it at nearly every opportunity.
“It can’t be dismissed that easily. [Trump] really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen,” Clinton said during the first presidential debate in New York.
Trump, for his part, responded Sunday evening by claiming Clinton is the one who first questioned Obama’s identity.
His claim that Clinton started the “birther” movement has drawn flunking grades from the nation’s fact-checkers, but it’s not exactly black and white.
“[T]here’s no evidence that she or her campaign questioned his birth certificate or his citizenship,” the Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote.
However, pro-Clinton Democrats in 2008 appear to have participated in efforts to cast doubt on Obama’s background, Lee and other fact-checkers, including PolitiFact, reported.
CNN reported in May that though “Clinton herself never questioned Obama’s birth certificate,” she is 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.
And the role Clinton supporters played in the othering of Obama in 2008 may have gone further than just circulating old photos.
