On September 16, Donald Trump made a truly news breaking announcement. He announced that President Obama was born in the United States.
This announcement wasn’t news to anyone.
What made it newsworthy, “amazing” or “ astonishing” as Trump might say was because Trump was the leading proponent of the ridiculous theory that the President wasn’t born in the United States and was therefore an illegitimate President.
Trump wasn’t the first to call into question President Obama’s citizenship.
There is been a long line of Republican candidates who are “birthers,” including Sarah Palin, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, former Louisiana Senator David Vitter, former Governor of Arkansas and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former Congresswoman and Presidential candidate Michele Bachman, Congressman Nathan Deal, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Congressman Mike Coffman and a number of talk show hosts including Rush Limbaugh and current Trump shill, Sean Hannity.
There is no question, however, that the loudest voice in the birther movement was (and perhaps still is) Donald Trump.
Trump began his campaign to undermine the President’s legitimacy in 2011 despite the fact Obama had released his Hawaiian short form birth certificate in 2008 when questions arose because his father was a British subject born in Kenya. At one point Trump claimed that he had sent private investigators to Hawaii and told a television audience that “you can’t believe what they are finding.”
Since Trump never disclosed what they found, we’ll never know whether it was believable.
Trump wasn’t alone in this pursuit. Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff of Maricopa County surrounding Phoenix, Arizona actually sent an investigator to Hawaii at public expense to try and unearth that the President wasn’t an American citizen.
Arpaio has been repeatedly held in contempt by the U.S. District Court in Arizona for racially profiling Latinos.
He once famously marched male detainees through the streets of Phoenix, forcing them to wear pink underwear. Maricopa County has paid forty-three million dollars to settle claims for deaths and injuries to inmates in his custody during his tenure.
It’s safe to say that if Arpaio had been born thirty years earlier, he would have been prosecuted at Neuremberg at the end of World War II.
While Trump has dropped the “birther” claim, for now, Arpaio is still pursuing it, contending that The President’s long form birth certificate released by the White House in 2011 is a forgery.
Trump’s fixation on the President’s citizenship and immigration in general is curious, given the fact that two of his wives, Ivana and Melania are immigrants. When questions were raised about Melania’s status, the Trump campaign announced that she would hold a news conference to answer all questions. Instead, it released a letter from an attorney vouching for her legal status and provided no additional information.
Apparently Trump’s taxes aren’t the only issue that will remain undisclosed and unresolved.
While Trump continues to stonewall on the issues of his tax returns and his wife’s immigration path to citizenship, he is still in pursuit of other details from the President’s life.
He has offered money to the President and anyone else who can disclose the President’s passport records, college applications and his transcripts of his college grades.
You might ask what motivates Trump in these pursuits of the President’s life history ?
The answer is race.
It always has been.
Racism is an integral feature in Trump’s character and life story.
It always will be.