Donald Trump now allegedly believes President Obama was born in America
As Election Day looms and the polls tighten, GOP nominee Donald Trump may be making yet another pivot: he is apparently ditching his role as a prominent voice in the "Obama Birther" movement.
The news came via Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, who says Trump now believes Obama was born in Hawaii as the president and his birth certificate have made clear. Of course, Trump himself has not yet vocalized this belief, but Giuliani swears it's true.
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The problem, of course, is that it's a sudden reversal for a man who became a popular figure in ultra-conservative circles before he entered the 2016 race by staking out a claim as one of the loudest voices among those who believed Obama was born in Kenya (or somewhere else outside the United States).
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Trump has even continued to implicitly hold steady on this belief during this campaign and recycled it for use on Ted Cruz during the GOP primary.
In honor of this historic pivot, here's a list of the many times Trump expressed skepticism about Obama's birthplace.
2011
Trump spoke with Meredith Vieira, then of NBC's Today Show, and insisted that he just wished Obama would resolve the whole birth certificate thing, all the while declaring it very much unresolved.
The same year, Trump appeared on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, where O'Reilly repeatedly dismissed the birther conspiracy. But Trump wouldn't let it drop, saying all kinds of document fraud may have taken place, that Obama's parents wouldn't have put an announcement in any newspaper because they were "poor" and, as an effort to get the public to believe his supposed skepticism had value, he insisted he is a "very smart guy."
Trump likes to insist he's a "smart guy," whenever he says something without any evidence. He did the same thing during an appearance on "The View."
About a month after that, Trump held a news conference where he said he was "very proud of himself" for getting Obama to release his birth certificate.
2012
But Trump continued to peddle the conspiracy theory the next year, tweeting that an "incredibly credible source" had said Obama's birth certificate was faked, much like how he now trots out unnamed experts to back up his opinions on the campaign trail.
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2013
Trump still hadn't changed his tune in August of 2013, less than two years before he'd announce a run for president.
When asked whether he still believed Obama was born outside the U.S., he said, "I have no idea."
And he continued to use Twitter to make it seem as though Obama was trying to cover up the information.
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2015
After launching his campaign, Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper he still didn't know whether Obama had been born in the U.S., but insisted that he didn't really want to talk about the issue any longer.
In a similar interview with NBC's Katy Tur, he also tries to put off his birther-ism as an "old issue."
On The Late Show, rather than change his tune, Trump again said he "doesn't talk about it anymore."
On the campaign trail later that year, Trump laughed as a questioner said Obama wasn't born in the country.
We'll see if he changes his mind -- again -- in 2016.
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
