Trump's Birtherism Dishonesty

Two things happened overnight.

First, from the Washington Post:

In the interview, conducted late Wednesday aboard his private plane as it idled on the tarmac here, Trump suggested he is not eager to change his pitch or his positions even as he works to reach out to minority voters, many of whom are deeply offended by his long-refuted suggestion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.

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

When asked whether his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was accurate when she said recently that he now believes Obama was born in this country, 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.” [Emphasis added.]

Then a little later, the campaign released this.  It begins with a lie:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President.

Politifact looked at this some time ago and declared it false:

There is no record that Clinton herself or anyone within her campaign ever advanced the charge that Obama was not born in the United States. A review by our fellow fact-checkers at Factcheck.org reported that no journalist who investigated this ever found a connection to anyone in the Clinton organization.

So Trump's lying.  Again.

Then in the second paragraph there's this:

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. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

You'll note that he's not talking about this birth certificate, released in June of 2008:

It's signed, it's crimped, it's dated.  It's an official document from the State of Hawaii.

No, Trump was talking about this birth certificate released almost three years later in April 2011.

By the way, Trump characterized this second official document from the State of Hawaii this way:

An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012

More than a year later, he still thought it was a fraud.

It raises a few questions that Donald Trump needs to answer.

• Had the White House not released the second document, would Trump still be an out-and-proud birther?
• What made him change his opinion of the second document?  How did it go from being a "fraud" to ample evidence that Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii?
• How does he explain that he was so wrong for all those years?

Along with Secretary Clinton's 20 questions for Trump regarding the recent Newsweek piece, Trump still has to answer for his past (and possibly still present) birtherism.

President Obama’s successor cannot and will not be the man who led the racist birther movement. Period.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 16, 2016