Barack Obama on Friday responded to news that Donald Trump would finally acknowledge that he was born in the United States with chagrin that this was still even an issue eight years after he won the presidency, five years after he released his birth certificate, and 55 years after he was born in Hawaii.
“I was pretty confident about where I was born,” Obama said. “I think that most people were. My hope would be that the presidential election reflects more serious issues than that.”
Trump on Thursday refused to answer questions about whether he believed Obama was born in the United States in an interview with the Washington Post, before his campaign released a factually inaccurate statement with Trump claiming credit for putting the issue to bed.
Hillary Clinton on Friday called on Trump to apologize for pushing the debunked conspiracy theory to begin with.
“Just yesterday, Trump again refused to say with his own words that the president was born in the United States,” Clinton said. “Now, Donald’s advisers had the temerity to say he’s doing the country a service by pushing these lies. No, he isn’t. He is feeding into the worst impulses, the bigotry and bias that lurks in our country. Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple, and Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology.”
