I’ve always found it strange when people questioned president Barack Obama’s birthplace after his election. He’s already president and he released his birth certificate in 2011. This issue was resolved long ago, but apparently republican presidential candidate Donald Trump didn’t get the memo. He is still talking and speculating about it in this year’s election, when Obama is at the end of his presidency and there is no chance of him becoming president again. Even Hillary Clinton, democratic presidential candidate, is wasting her time on this old topic when there are so many more important issues to discuss. This is one of the silly, unimportant things that will not affect our country moving forward but still has the attention of the presidential candidates, the media and the voters.
When will these politicians start addressing issues that really matter? Now that the topic has been addressed however, one might as well discuss it once so everyone can move on.
Not only was Trump still questioning whether Obama was born in Hawaii in 2016, he and his campaign both lied about his involvement in the conspiracy theory to begin with.
First of all, Trump said that Clinton started the rumors when she was running against Obama in the 2008 campaign. This is not true, as the rumors really started when a man named Andy Martin distributed a press release saying that Obama was Muslim. According to the New York Times, the theories from there escalated until people were writing and talking about where Obama was born. Some Clinton supporters may have picked it up in 2008, but they soon dropped it when Obama was elected and then it was only the Republicans who kept feeding the controversy.
Trump also lied about being the one to get Obama to release his birth certificate as well as dropping the issue in 2011 when it happened. Instead of talking about it outright, Trump took to Twitter to suggest, or outright state, that the birth certificate Obama provided was fake.
These tweets stopped around 2014 and Trump’s campaign claims that he now believes that Obama was born in the U.S. Again, that was false as Trump refused to talk about his stance on this increasingly ridiculous situation in a Washington Post interview where he said he would “answer that question at the right time. I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
Finally, Trump made a statement in September saying that “Obama was born in the United States, period.” The only problem is he again lied, saying Clinton started the rumors and that he ended them. At this point, it is really hard to believe anything Donald Trump or his campaign says.
Both Clinton and Obama responded to this speech with their own words. Clinton yelled that Donald Trump would be the kind of president “who sees someone who doesn’t look like him and doesn’t agree with him and thinks that person must not be a real American.”
While this is an understandable conclusion to draw from the way Trump has been acting during this campaign, it is still a wild accusation, an accusation that took up time that could have been spent talking about things that are more important.
Obama was the only one who made a good point. He said the campaigners should be talking about ISIS, climate change, poverty and many more issues that affect this country.
When I first started getting into politics, I thought running for president meant letting everyone know that one can serve one’s country the best because of one’s qualities.
Now I see it’s about letting everyone know to vote for you because all of your opponent’s qualities are worse than yours. It makes me sad to think that our country has come to this.