Trump supporters struggle to sideline ‘birther’ issue

Donald Trump’s most prominent supporters insisted Sunday that he’s put the burden of “birtherism” behind him with his concession that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

In an August 2013 interview with ABC News’ Jon Karl, for example, Trump stood behind his push to reveal Obama’s “true birth status”.

“If you think that anyone is going to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or against either one of them based upon this issue, then I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the concerns of the American people”, Christie said.

“It’s not true that he kept it up for five years”, Christie said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.

Christie: “No, Jake. It wasn’t like he was talking about it on a regular basis. And when the issue was raised, he made very clear the other day what his position is”. In 2011, Obama released a copy of his birth certificate to put to rest what many considered fringe conspiracy theories aimed at undermining his legitimacy as president. But like their candidate, they tried to blame Hillary Clinton’s campaign and rejected any notion that Trump’s political identity is founded on five years of peddling the false rumor that Obama was born elsewhere.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd presented Conway with a lengthy list of issues on which Trump has recently changed his stated views, including birtherism, tax cuts for the wealthy, a Muslim ban, the minimum wage, the Iraq invasion, Libya intervention, abortion, whether he would self-fund his campaign, whether to accept Syrian refugees, and Japan and nuclear weapons.

Conway also mentioned a memo circulated by Mark Penn when he was chief strategist for Clinton’s 2008 campaign that talked about Obama’s lack of American roots.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s heading up Trump’s transition team and has long said Obama was born in the USA, insisted on CNN that “the birther issue is a done issue”.

The campaign can’t escape Trump’s birtherism, and they have set the stage for Trump’s history of racist treatment of nation’s first African-American president to be an issue in the first presidential debate. “Period.” Solis Doyle had said on CNN on Friday that a campaign volunteer in 2007 forwarded an email that “promoted the conspiracy”, but the campaign fired that person and apologized to Obama.

He blamed a Clinton aide for saying that Clinton herself pushed questions about Obama’s birthplace during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

But Kellyanne, in- in 2012, when he was thinking about running for president, he tweeted things like this: “An extremely credible source has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud”.

But Kaine said some of Trump’s supporters will never be persuaded to back Clinton.

Follow the latest live updates on the NY explosion here “I must tell you that just before I got off the plane a bomb went off in NY and nobody knows what’s going on”, Mr Trump said. But, again, I think that this is a sideshow now that the media seem obsessed with, John, respectfully. Those are his words. “He does things on his terms, on his time line”.