Could Donald Trump be following Karl Rove’s advice and dropping his public birtherism once and for all? In an op-ed published in USA Today on Thursday morning, Trump writes that he’s ready to stop all the birther chatter.
“I have spoken my piece on this issue,” Trump wrote, reminding readers that “many people have the same doubts as I have.”
Trump says he’s ready to shift the conversation about his maybe-candidacy to something more substantive.
“My concern lies with people like the single mom who recently wrote to me that she now works a third job to pay for the gas to get to the other two,” Trump writes.
Trump appears to be interested in shifting the conversation to core issues beyond Obama’s birth certificate — which Trump has questioned to great fame and polling fortune over the past month. From the op-ed:
There are many important and pressing issues that, should I elect to run, I will address — including China, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the price of fuel, unfair trade, unsustainable debt, the creation of jobs and the rising price of food.
Trump says he never wanted to talk about the birth certificate as much as he has. It’s the media’s fault that the issue has become so central to talk of his potential campaign, he writes.
“Sadly, the press has en masse chosen to glom onto but one of the myriad issues I have discussed and would tackle as president,” he writes.
Trump, of course, kicked off his birther fever back at CPAC in February, when he raised the issue in his surprise speech there. Then, in a string of subsequent interviews, he not only expressed his skepticism about the president’s citizenship but promised to reveal the secrets of Obama’s birth before the summer thanks to a special investigation he claims to have been running in Hawaii, but won’t discuss and details of.
Just this morning in fact — as his USA Today op-ed was hitting the carpet outside hotel room doors everywhere — Trump told CNN that “at a certain point in time I’ll be revealing some interesting things” about Obama’s birth, while also claiming that he’s winning in the polls “is because I’ll protect this country from China and OPEC and all the others that are ripping us off.”
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It’s worth noting that coverage of Trump has shifted recently to talk of his newfound conservative political stances. That has not gone entirely well for Trump, though he seems interested in moving the conversation about him away from birtherism anyway.
