As I mentioned a short while ago, who riffs about “gas chambers” in joking conversations or to illustrate some mundane aspect of the news of the day. There’s gallows humor, even about the Holocaust, even among Jews. But this just seemed weird.
Is this how the Trump family talks?
With the inclusion of this afternoon’s Fox Poll, the Polltracker Average is now exactly tied. Clinton 43.8%, Trump 43.8%.
Art inside the Trump/Pence HQ at Trump Tower in NYC pic.twitter.com/MSVIVOZgOU
— Ines de La Cuetara (@InesdLC) September 15, 2016
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With Donald Trump it is literally hard to keep up with the lies. As of this morning he’s saying he’s going to have a “big announcement today” about birtherism and that he can’t say what it is because he needs to “keep the suspense going.” Yesterday he doubled-down on birtherism, disputing his own campaign manager’s claim that he now believes Barack Obama was born in the United States.
The advance word we’re getting is that in his remarks this morning, Trump will follow the lead of his press release yesterday and claim that Hillary Clinton invented and advanced birtherism even though this claim has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. It seems that Trump will seek to hang his hat on a confidential memo Clinton’s 2008 strategist Mark Penn wrote in which he said that Obama’s ‘exotic’ background was a liability not a strength. But Clinton never took up this advice, which is good because Penn is a notorious moron. (See my posts going back a decade on this point.) But more importantly, Penn never suggested Obama wasn’t born in the United States or wasn’t a US citizen. The fever swamp of Birtherism was already swamping at the time. Clinton had nothing to do with it. Even Trump had nothing to do with its origins, as far as I know. But he quickly became its greatest champion.
Here’s how CNN’s John Berman led off the top of the 11 o’clock hour (ET):
Trump just said that he “finished” the birther controversy by forcing President Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. But for literally years after the release of the long form birth certificate Trump continued to claim it was either a forgery or that it didn’t establish that President Obama was born in the United States
At the peak of birtherism, you may remember, an Army lieutenant colonel refused to deploy to Afghanistan absent proof that President Obama was born in the United States. The officer, a doctor named Terrence Lakin, was court-martialed, found guilty, jailed, and discharged from the Army.
One of Donald Trump’s introducers today at the new Trump Hotel, was a retired Air Force general who supported Lakin. He even submitted an affidavit on his behalf, questioning whether Obama was properly within the chain of command, since his U.S. birth was in question.
So there you have it: Trump brings a birther to his presser purporting to disavow birtherism.