Hillary Clinton and her campaign team clearly think attacking Donald Trump for his embrace of so-called birtherism is a winning issue, as even first lady Michelle Obama got in on the game at a campaign rally Wednesday.
“There are those who question — and continue to question for the past eight years — whether my husband was even born in this country,” Obama said to a chorus of boos in Philadelphia. “And let me say: Hurtful, deceitful questions deliberately designed to undermine his presidency. Questions that cannot be blamed on others or swept under the rug by an insincere sentence uttered at a press conference.”
“Let me take a moment,” she continued, “during his time in office, I think Barack has answered these questions with the example he set and the dignity he has shown by going high when they go low.”
The first lady also mocked Trump’s temperament, and challenged the notion he has any idea what it takes to lead from the Oval Office.
“We need someone who will take the job seriously,” Obama said. “We need adults in the White House.”
Clinton and her team of campaign surrogates 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 bigotry and flat-out racism.
“For five years, [Trump] has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president,” Clinton said earlier this month at an address at the Black Women’s Agenda 39th Annual Symposium. “His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie. There is no erasing it in history. Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple. And Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology.
“Donald Trump looks at President Obama after eight years as our president. He still doesn’t see him as an American. Think of how dangerous that is. Imagine a person in the Oval Office who traffics in conspiracy theories and refuses to let them go no matter what the facts are,” she said.
Trump backed away from his embrace of birtherism during an address this 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 Monday during the first presidential debate.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., added on Sept. 19 at a campaign rally in Ames, Iowa, “We are not going to let him move on to the next issue,” saying “This is not just a wacky guy saying wacky stuff. This is incredibly painful to millions of people.”
“When Donald Trump decides about the first African-American president of this country, to repeatedly go after him and say, ‘You are not a citizen of the United States,’ he’s basically hauling us back to the most painful chapter in the life of this nation,” Kaine said.
“Why would someone like Donald Trump want to drag us back to that painful chapter in in American life, when if you were African-American you couldn’t be a citizen?” the Virginia senator asked.
Trump was asked later why he flipped on his previous enthusiasm for birtherism, to which he responded, “Well I just wanted to get on with, I wanted to get on with the campaign. A lot of people were asking me questions.”
