Trump Still Won’t Say President Obama Was Born In The US – NPR

Donald Trump is again refusing to say whether he believes President Obama was born in the United States.

In an interview with the Washington Post, the Republican presidential nominee — a onetime leader in the so-called birther movement to pressure the president to release his birth certificate — still wouldn’t admit that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.

“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said during an interview in Ohio. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

“I don’t talk about it anymore. The reason I don’t is because then everyone is going to be talking about it as opposed to jobs, the military, the vets, security,” Trump explained about the conspiracy theory he long championed, about the country’s first African-American president.

But his reluctance to put the issue to rest once and for all is departure from what his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said last Friday.

“He believes President Obama was born here,” Conway said on CNN. “I was born in Camden, by the way, New Jersey. He was born in Hawaii.”

Trump responsed to Conway’s comments by saying, “It’s ok. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things.”

His running mater, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said earlier this month that he accepts the fact that President Obama was born in Hawaii.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani also claimed just last week that the GOP nominee now accepts the president’s legal birthplace.

“Donald Trump believes now that [Obama] was born in the United States,” Giuliani said on CNN. “I believe it. He believes it. We all believe it. It took a long time to get out.”

But while his top surrogates are circulating assertions that Trump has dropped any birther beliefs, the Republican nominee still refuses to say the words and is keeping the issue alive.

Trump championed the fringe theory about Obama — who some believed was born in Kenya and might even be a secret Muslim — during the 2012 election cycle and was its largest driving force, as the New York Times explored earlier this year:

In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.

The White House eventually released President Obama’s long-form birth certificate showing that he was, indeed, born in Honolulu in 1961.

Just as that was happening, Trump landed in New Hampshire while he was flirting with a presidential bid four years ago and claimed victory.

“I’m very proud of myself,” Trump said. “I’ve accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish.”