Donald Trump said Friday he no longer believes President Obama was born outside of the U.S., putting to rest the doubts he once held and that he had been reluctant to discuss until now.
Speaking to reporters, veterans, Medal of Honor recipients and a handful of campaign aides inside the lavish presidential ballroom of his new Washington, D.C. hotel, the Republican presidential nominee blamed Hillary Clinton for starting the “birther controversy.”
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“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” he said.
“President Obama was born in the United States. Period,” Trump declared. “Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
The acknowledgment came less than 24 hours after Trump’s senior communications director, Jason Miller, released a statement claiming the GOP presidential hopeful brought “closure” to questions surrounding Obama’s citizenship by “successfully compelling” him to release his birth certificate in 2011.
“Mr. Trump did a great service to the president and to the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised,” Miller said, adding that Trump “is a closer.”
Trump repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship ahead of the president’s re-election campaign in 2012 and choosing to readdress his birtherism could be a risky move for Trump, as his campaign is in the middle of mounting a fierce comeback after weeks of trailing Clinton in national state-level polls.
Republican National Committee senior strategist Sean Spicer declined to say whether Trump’s remarks would be a distraction from what his campaign has been focused on recently, namely his new child care policy and changes to his tax plan.
“Ask me that after today,” he told reporters. “How he addresses it, whatever [he says] today, will answer your question better than I can.”
But even before Trump took the stage inside his Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, his opponent was shifting the conversation into unfavorable territory at an event just a mile away in downtown Washington.
“For five years, he has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president,” Hillary Clinton told a crowd gathered at the Black Women’s Agenda Symposium. “His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie.”
“There is no erasing it in history,” she said.
Trump angered reporters by refusing to take questions on Friday after his campaign billed the event as a press conference beforehand.
