Donald Trump’s Latest Birther Lie - By The Editorial Board of the New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD SEPT. 16, 2016
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“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Mr. Trump maintained with a straight face, speaking in Washington to a crowd of friendly military veterans. “I finished it.” Then he conceded the truth, an act that must have felt very peculiar to him: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”
Not quite period, much as Trump strategists now wish it were. Mr. Trump is probably hoping to reassure voters that he is edging into the mainstream, that he is not just the reckless, cynical bully of the Republican primaries. But the birther lies cling to him as tightly as his nativist hallucinators.
The facts — because facts still matter — are that Mr. Trump continued to heap doubt on President Obama’s birth certificate even after it was released, slyly retweeting others’ contentions that it was a fake and a “computer generated forgery.”
After he tried to pin the birther smear on her, Mrs. Clinton called it what it is: an “outrageous lie” intended to “delegitimize our first black president.” Mr. Trump delegitimized his own candidacy instead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/opinion/donald-trumps-latest-birther-lie.html?emc=edit_th_20160917&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284&_r=0
