Reporters waited more than 20 minutes Friday after being lured to the grand opening of Donald Trump's newest hotel by promises that the Republican presidential nominee would finally acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States, only to hear him continue to advance the falsehood that rival Hillary Clinton is ultimately to blame for the Birther movement.
At Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., Trump ended his years long effort to delegitimize the first African-American president of the United States, only to then claim credit for ending the pernicious smear he claimed Obama's 2008 Democratic primary rival, Clinton, started.
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," Trump said. “Hillary Clinton started the birther controversy, I finished it.”
"Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again,” Trump said at the highly anticipated event initially billed as a press conference, without taking questions from reporters.
The event was clearly a charade in the eyes of the Trump campaign (read: The candidate), as evidenced by fact that Trump was introduced at the event by another co-called birther.
As TPM noted, one of the military vets who spoke immediately before Trump, Retired Air Force Lieutenant and Fox News contributor General Thomas McInerney, wrote an affidavit in support of Army Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin, who was refusing to deploy to Afghanistan because he did not believe Obama was a legitimate president.
McInerney cited the "widespread and legitimate concerns" about Obama's birth records in the 2010 affidavit.
Watch Trump's stunt below, via the Washington Post:
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