Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told the Washington Post in a Wednesday interview that was published on Thursday that he would not say that President Obama was born in the United States. The Post reporter, onboard Trump’s plane, mentioned Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, who had said that he now believes Obama was born in this country, to which Trump responded: “It’s okay. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things.”
Eight years ago, and then for the years that followed, Trump espoused publicly his view that President Obama was born overseas, probably in Kenya, the home of his African father, which made him ineligible for the presidency. In 2011 Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate 2011, but Trump persisted with his claim and has yet to disavow it. Trump’s response to the document was, “Well I don’t know. Was it a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
When the Post reporter noted that the birther conspiracy theory could still hang over his candidacy, Trump “glared” and said, “I think it hangs over the reporters.”
Trump’s campaign released a statement late Thursday insisting the nominee actually believes Obama was born in the US. campaign spokesman Jason Miller said in the statement: “In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised.”
There is no record that Clinton herself or her campaign ever advanced the claim that Obama was not born in the United States. Factcheck.org reported that no journalistic report exists about a link between the Clinton camp and the theory. However, according to a Telegraph article, in April 2008 a Clinton supporter sent out an email saying, “Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.”
