‘I finished it,’ Trump says on controversy over Obama birthplace

In his brief statement – little more than 30 seconds – the Republican nominee also blamed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for starting “birther” rumors during the 2008 primary against Obama, but there is no factual basis for that claim.

The admission came as Hillary Clinton returned to the White House campaign trail seeking to regain the momentum lost to Trump during her battle with pneumonia, especially in the country’s key battleground states. “I finished it. President Obama was born in the United States of America”.

“Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again”, Trump send before walking off the stage.

“Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton traded barbs Thursday over the Republican nominee’s past suggestions that President Obama was born outside the USA and thus ineligible to be president, after Trump initially declined in an interview a day earlier to definitively say the president was born in America”.

“This sickening display shows more than ever why Donald Trump is totally unfit be president”.

This “Clinton started it” line of attack isn’t new for Trump; he (and Ted Cruz as well) brought it up in late 2015. I just heard the press is stuck on their airplane.

He also unveiled proposals that he claimed would result in a 25 million new jobs and a 4 per cent growth that would return the country to an economic spurt it last saw in the Bill Clinton era.

Slate has produced a comprehensive index to the tweets by Trump – all made after Obama’s document release in 2011 – in which the real-estate magnate either openly advocated birtherism or promoted skepticism about the official story of Obama’s birth.

The president on Friday added that he hoped the election would focus on more serious issues, and that he “was pretty confident about where I was born”. So at a freaky event at his recently-finished hotel in Washington, D.C., Trump tried to put the birther issue behind him on Friday – by duping the media and lying that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the whole story in the first place.

The birther conspiracies, which aim to challenge the legality of Obama’s presidency, incense black Americans whose votes Trump has been trying to court.

“I think most people were as well”, the president said in the Oval Office, registering his “shock” that such a topic would be raised when there were other important policy questions to address. So my friends, there is no new Donald Trump. “President Obama was born in the United States”.

In the latest survey, beliefs that Obama was born outside the United States peaked at 26 percent among Republicans and 34 percent among self-identified tea party supporters, compared with 19 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats.

June 29, 2014: “Always remember, I was the one who got Obama to release his birth certificate, or whatever that was!”

Trump’s recently installed campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, told a reporter earlier this week that Trump had changed his mind and now believes Obama was born in the United States. “Period”, Trump said. That was it. “In a sense, you could say that [Trump] was leveraging five years of birther conspiracy to promote his hotel, but now we’ve been listening to veterans and military officials praising Donald Trump”.

Earlier, Mrs Clinton told the Black Women’s Association in the USA capital: “Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple, and Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology”. “It’s OK. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks”.

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller issued a statement that suggested the question had been settled five years ago – by Trump. “A lot of people feel it wasn’t a proper certificate”, Trump said after the host noted that Obama had released his birth certificate. Trump is the first nominee from a major party since 1976 to not release his returns, and he has also declined to release documentation of his wife’s immigration from Slovenia, full medical records and other documents typically shared by nominees.