Donald Trump on Friday stated that he no longer believes President Barack Obama was born outside the United States, breaking away from a conspiracy theory that helped fuel his political rise.
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again,” Trump said at his new Washington hotel, flanked by Medal of Honor recipients, in an appearance that often seemed like a plug for his property and an extended endorsement of Trump by veterans.
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He also blamed Hillary Clinton for raising questions about Obama's citizenship during the 2008 campaign, despite no evidence that she did so.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it,” he said on Friday morning, referencing his public pressure campaign in 2011 that resulted in Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.
The reversal came after his aides and allies had publicly pressured him to disavow the theories, which had furthered the racist and xenophobic undertones of his presidential campaign. But Trump had continued to play coy, often saying in interviews that the issue didn’t matter anymore, even as he refused to state outright that he no longer believed Obama could have been born in Kenya.
Clinton and her allies reacted to Trump’s statement with disgust.
"What Trump just did is a disgrace," the Democratic nominee tweeted.
Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm was more succinct: “I. Can't. Even.”
And Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid scoffed at Trump's accusation. "Hillary brought it up? What a liar," he said on CNN.
The shift comes as Trump has emerged as a more disciplined candidate — relatively — after Kellyanne Conway, a respected GOP pollster, was installed as his campaign manager in a leadership shakeup last month.
While Trump has had lapses — notably attacking an African-American pastor on Thursday after she cut off his speech in a Flint church — he has generally been more restrained, even taking a pass on health conspiracy theories after Clinton nearly collapsed following a pneumonia diagnosis.
But Clinton, in a prebuttal, warned against voters falling for Trump’s supposed change of heart. "So my friends, there is no new Donald Trump. There never will be," Clinton said at the Black Women's Agenda Symposium workshop in Washington, which occurred before Trump’s news conference.
The Democratic nominee accused Trump of "feeding into the worst impulse" that still exists in America for his role in leading the birther conspiracies. "For five years, he has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president. His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie," Clinton said at the Black Women's Agenda Symposium workshop in Washington, which occurred before Trump’s news conference. "He's 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."
Her campaign later issued a statement calling Trump's actions "disgraceful" and saying the "sickening display" shows why Trump is unfit to be president.
Obama also weighed in before Trump spoke, telling reporters at the White House, “I was pretty confident about where I was born.”
“I'm shocked that a question like that would come up at a time when we have got so many other things to do,” Obama said, before adding, “Well I'm not that shocked, actually. It's really typical. We got other business to attend to.”
He continued, “And my hope would be that the presidential election reflects more serious issues than that.”
As recently as Wednesday Trump had declined in an interview with the Washington Post to acknowledge that Obama is a U.S. citizen, perhaps because he wanted to avoid stepping on the Friday announcement.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump told the newspaper in an interview that was conducted on Wednesday and published on Thursday. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
Asked on "Good Morning America" Friday morning whether his father would say himself that Obama was born in the U.S., Donald Trump Jr. responded, "I don't know." But he said that a statement issued late Thursday by Trump campaign aide Jason Miller "should be the definitive end of it. We thought it was the definitive end when he acknowledged that, 'hey, we got Obama to release his birth certificate' then but, again, we want to talk about jobs. We don't want to talk about gossip."
Miller's statement came after the Washington Post published its article on Trump remaining unwilling to acknowledge Obama was born in the U.S. Clinton said on Thursday night that those comments showed "bigotry."
The Trump campaign presented the late-night reversal as a victory lap of sorts, claiming he had forced the president to put questions about his origins to rest — questions it said, incorrectly, were first raised by Clinton in 2008.
"In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate," Miller said, adding that Trump "did a great service to the president and the country by bringing closure to the issue."
Miller continued: "Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States."
He also alleged that it was Clinton who "first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for president" but said she was "too weak to get an answer."
While some of her supporters voiced suspicions about Obama's true birthplace at the time, independent fact checkers have found the claim that Clinton did so to be false, and she has called the idea "ludicrous."
Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, earlier this month broke with Trump, stating, “I believe Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton's former primary rival, earlier on Friday expressed disgust that Trump was enabling his supporters’ darker impulses by remaining coy for so long.
“Yeah it matters. Because, he's trying to waffle,” Sanders said on CNN. “He's trying to appeal to those extreme, extreme, extreme, extremists who still believe that Obama was not born in America.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tried to turn the heat on Trump’s fellow Republicans, saying the Republican nominee is following the lead of GOP lawmakers who have long peddled hateful language. "None of the things that he has said that members of Congress haven't said over and over again on the Republican side," Pelosi said on CNN, quickly adding, that it is "not all of them."
Asked whether she meant that Republican members of Congress are following Trump's lead, Pelosi said it was the opposite.
"No, I think he's following theirs. I think that in Congress if you look at the record, the public record on, for example, immigration," the California Democrat continued. "There are worse statements made by members of Congress for a long period of time that they tried to implement into law in terms of Muslims into our country. Shocking language used by Republicans in Congress. So he’s a reflection of them, which is why I think that some of the establishment Republicans are unhappy with Trump for what he says, but also he's pulled back the veil."
It was arguably Trump, as he flirted with a presidential run ahead of the 2012 election, who injected "birtherism" into the national political conversation.
"I have people that have been studying [Obama's birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they're finding ... I would like to have him show his birth certificate, and can I be honest with you, I hope he can," Trump said on NBC's "Today Show" in April 2011. "Because if he can't, if he can't, if he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility ... then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics."
Trump's investigative findings never materialized. But he continued to cast doubt on Obama's nationality, even after the White House released the president's long-form birth certificate.
In July 2012, he congratulated Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff best known for his hardline immigration stance, "on his successful Cold Case Posse investigation which claims @BarackObama's 'birth certificate' is fake."
In August 2012, he tweeted, "An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud."
In an August 2013 interview with ABC News, Trump said: "Was it a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I'm saying I don't know. Nobody knows."
And in December 2013, Trump even implied that a Hawaii official who had vouched for the birth certificate's authenticity had been murdered. "How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s 'birth certificate' died in plane crash today. All others lived," he tweeted.
As recently as January 2016, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Trump said "who knows" if Obama was born in the United States, and said he had his "own theory" on the matter that he planned to lay out in a forthcoming book.
"It'll do very successfully," he added.
But as his current advisers try to address concerns among his pollsters that too many voters view the GOP nominee as racist, they have sought to put the issue to behind him.
His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said in a recent TV interview that Trump "believes President Obama was born here," and several top surrogates, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have urged him to say so publicly.
Asked about Conway's comments, Trump told the Post: “It’s OK. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks. I want to focus on jobs, I want to focus on other things.”
But when the Post followed up with further questions, he said: “I don’t talk about it anymore. The reason I don’t is because then everyone is going to be talking about it as opposed to jobs, the military, the vets, security.”
As far as whether Obama feels resentful that Trump pulled back from his birtherism without expressing regret,White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president "doesn't much care."
“I think when the president released the long-form version of his birth certificate in this room five years ago, he was hoping that people would move on,” Earnest said.
Louis Nelson contributed to this report.
