Special report: The day America took leave of its senses

[cal04]

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/special-report-the-day-america-took-leave-of-its-senses-2275816.html

Has there ever been a more absurdly surreal moment, even in US politics, that unchallengeable theatre of the absurd and the surreal? One moment, we were watching a property magnate, with one eye on the presidency, the other on his reality TV show ratings, and puffed up like a bullfrog, rejoicing on an airport tarmac in New Hampshire that America's President of two years had finally made public his birth certificate.

The next, America's TV networks interrupted their schedules to cut to the White House, where that self-same President appeared to confirm the momentous fact: not that Barack Obama had indeed been born, but that the happy event indeed took place, as no sane person has ever doubted, on the unimpeachably American soil of Hawaii, one August evening in 1961.

Of late, however, America has seemed to be taking leave of its senses. A quarter of the population, polls showed, and close on half of Republicans, still refused to believe that unassailable fact.

(snip)
The "birther" controversy – in other words, the contention that the 44th president had, in fact, entered this world in Kenya or Indonesia and that the Hawaii business was a conspiracy – has moved to the lunatic centre of American political debate. And no one has done more to propel it there than Donald Trump.