Orly Taitz is one of the most famous birthers in the country, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. So she paid attention to the news on Thursday and Friday, when Trump’s campaign and then the candidate himself finally acknowledged that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.
Taitz, a California-based dentist and lawyer who is sometimes called the “birther queen,” disagrees. But she said she still supports Trump, and does not think his comments were a blow to her years-long effort to expose what she believes is a cover-up of Obama’s true origins.
“People understand that we are just 53 days before the election ― we’re just eight weeks before the election,” she said in an interview. “So Donald Trump is doing what he needs to do. The most important thing is for him to win and to make this country great. This movement was never about Donald Trump, the movement was about Barack Obama.”
It may be true that the birther movement was about Obama and not Trump. But Trump commandeered it for years by using his platform as a celebrity to raise questions about whether Obama was lying about his birthplace. Regardless of whether or not he said “President Obama was born in the United States” on Friday, he partially built his political career on boosting the ideas of people like Taitz.
He continued to promote those ideas after 2011, even though his campaign claimed Thursday that it was the year he brought “this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate.”
Taitz said she’s never spoken to Trump about Obama’s birthplace. She said she called him in 2010 or 2011 and his secretary gave her the personal email address for Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen. She then forwarded Cohen information that she says proves that Obama stole a Social Security number, forged his birth certificate and lied numerous times about his name and birthplace, something she argued the media should ask about more.
“Mr. Trump knows all of this information,” Taitz said. She said that she wasn’t sure why Trump would say that Obama was born in the United States, but she’s “not a mind reader.”
She added that Trump “has no legal obligation to go after Barack Obama,” especially as he competes against Hillary Clinton.
“Right now, the most important thing is for him to win the presidency,” Taitz said. “Barack Obama is not currently running for office. Hillary Clinton is his opponent, so he’s focusing on her corruption.”
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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