New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) falsely claimed Donald Trump put to bed his skepticism of President Barack Obama’s birthplace years ago, despite clear and overwhelming evidence that the Republican presidential nominee had regularly stoked the conspiracy theory known as birtherism since 2011.
“It’s just not true that [Trump] kept it up for five years,” Christie, who endorsed the New York businessman early on in the campaign, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that aired Sunday. “It’s not like he was talking about it on a regular basis until then.”
Trump has a long history of promoting birtherism, as CNN’s Jake Tapper noted in the interview. Even after Obama released his long-form birth certificate in 2011, Trump continued to question whether the president was born in the U.S. in television interviews and online via his Twitter account. The businessman did so as recently as January of this year, sowing doubt about Obama’s roots when asked about being a birther. In 2014, Trump even invited hackers to see if Obama was lying about his birthplace.
The real estate mogul on Friday was forced to admit ― without apologizing ― that Obama was born in the U.S. after he once again refused to say so in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this week.
“President Obama was born in the United States, period,” Trump said, without offering an explanation as to why it took him five long years to admit the truth.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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