The Republican nominee abandons one old conspiracy theory and introduces a new one
By LEXINGTON | WASHINGTON, DC
DONALD TRUMP inhabits a world of shiny, gold-plated, nothing-really-matters nihilism, and he is betting that voters do, too. That is the best explanation for the show that the Republican nominee mounted on the morning of September 16th—with the full, helpless, beaten-cur connivance of the press, cable news and TV networks who covered it lavishly, at one point treating watching Americans to extended coverage of an empty podium inside Mr Trump’s new luxury hotel in Washington, DC, while the businessman’s motorcade nosed its way through the traffic. If the show proves popular with audiences outside the Beltway and opinion polls continue to narrow to a dead heat, the businessman-demagogue may yet win his bet.
The bizarre event was supposedly staged to clarify, after years of equivocation and rumour-mongering, that Mr Trump believes that Barack Obama was born in America, and is thus a legitimate holder of his office. Ostensibly, that is a big concession from a man whose path to the top of national politics began with his enthusiastic embrace of the “birther” movement, an ugly, race-tinged conspiracy theory that Mr Obama is lying about his birth in Hawaii. Aides to Mr Trump briefed reporters that the idea is to clear away the “birther” question before the first presidential debate on September 26th. Put another way, those aides know that Mr Trump used bigotry as a fuel additive to power his way to the presidential nomination. Now however to win the White House Mr Trump needs to wear down the resistance of a chunk of the Republican electorate, notably whites with college degrees, who cannot bring themselves to vote for a man being cheered on by racists. By nodding to the truth that Mr Obama is an American, he hopes to give such squeamish voters permission to cast ballots for him in November.
A better man than Mr Trump would have used the occasion to apologise. After all, he used his fame as a star of reality television to propel the birther conspiracy from the world of internet chat-rooms and smudgy pamphlets hawked at Tea Party rallies to a national talking-point. Mr Trump is not that better man, so instead served up his concession like a sandwich of cynicism: a sliver of truth, between two thick slices of deliberate untruth.
His first lie is to blame Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, for inventing the birther claims during her hard-fought battle with Mr Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. That is false. Rumours about Mr Obama’s birth did circulate as chain-emails among some hard-core Clinton fans at that time, but were disavowed by the former first lady’s campaign. It is also true that a pollster working for Mrs Clinton, Mark Penn, wrote a memo in 2007 suggesting that Mr Obama’s boyhood in Indonesia and youth in multicultural Hawaii amounted to a weakness, because he had “at best limited” roots in “basic American values and culture.”
It is also the case that Mrs Clinton, in a TV interview in March 2008, was asked whether she thought the then-Senator Obama is a Muslim, after a staffer on her campaign circulated an old photograph of Mr Obama in Asia, wearing a turban. She answered: “Of course not. I mean, that’s… You know, there is no basis for that. I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn’t any reason to doubt that.” Pressed a second time, she said there was nothing to base the belief on, “as far as I know”. Those last words have since been cited as evidence that Mrs Clinton was trying to sow doubt.
Mr Trump’s second lie is to claim that he did the country a service by settling the controversy when he demanded that Mr Obama release a long-form birth certificate, which the president eventually did—with understandable exasperation—in 2011. Some may doubt that Mr Trump’s motives were so noble. But still more simply, the New York property tycoon continued to promote the birther cause long after 2011, insinuating repeatedly in the years that followed that the birth certificate was a forgery. In a 2012 tweet Mr Trump declared that: “an extremely credible source” has called his office to say that Mr Obama’s certificate was a “fraud”. In an interview in 2014 with Irish television that earned heavy cable play on Friday, Mr Trump was reminded that Mr Obama had produced a birth certificate, proving his citizenship. “Well, a lot of people don’t agree with you and a lot of people feel it wasn’t a proper certificate,” he answered.
Why does this matter? It matters because Mr Trump has run a campaign that is tearing America apart along lines of race, gender and education, earning his widest leads by far among older white men with only a high school education. His supporters ascribe that success to his “Make America Great Again” promises to create new jobs and address economic stagnation in the rust belt. But that carefully ignores his years of dog-whistle hints that Mr Obama, the first black president, is an illegitimate and un-American fraud who owes his rise to affirmative-action policies—policies which anger many white voters. In 2011 Mr Trump demanded that Mr Obama release all his records showing how he secured a place at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, saying that: “I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” and adding: “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?…There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”
In June 2016, as he closed in on the Republican nomination, Mr Trump dropped hints that Mr Obama is a secret terrorist sympathiser—a claim, this reporter can confirm, that Trump supporters frequently make, unbidden, in interviews on the campaign trail. In his usual manner Mr Trump said that he personally thinks that Mr Obama has allowed terror attacks in America “because he doesn’t know what he is doing”. But “there are many people” who think that “maybe he doesn’t want to get it”, or that “he’s got something else in mind.”
Should the press have covered Mr Trump’s bizarre event? Many Democrats angrily complain that the media is giving the Republican an easy time in pursuit of ratings. He certainly set up in the event in a way that showed a knowing contempt for the way that television works, announcing that he had a major statement to make on the birther issue, then eating up long stretches of airtime with a parade of war heroes and former generals saying nice things about him, before delivering a terse few lines lasting a few seconds, stating: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States—period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
The media, this reporter would argue (and does argue in a Lexington column this week) is somewhat paralysed by the fact that Trump-backers forgive him any amount of nonsense. To criticise him, as a result, feels like criticising them for being credulous enough to swallow his lies and about-turns (or so partisan as to forgive him anything). As I wrote in my column, in part because of the fact that blue-collar voters are the base of his support, he has brilliantly manoeuvred himself into a place in which fact-checking him sounds like snobbery.
Mrs Clinton, for her part, needs to maintain Mr Trump’s pariah status among more centrist or educated Republicans. She scorned his concession on Mr Obama’s birthplace, saying that he had spread the birther conspiracy for five years, and that “there is no erasing” that record now. She had better hope she is right about that. Mr Trump clearly thinks he knows the electorate better than she does.
