No one with common sense takes Donald Trump seriously, but being the noisiest wheel that he is, Trump has forced one of the web’s most respected organizations to check into his Birther accusations. The Donald and the Birthers believe the president was born in Kenya, and is therefore not a legitimate president.
Enter FactCheck.org – the group that originally debunked the birther conspiracy – is checking into the wild claims and accusations of Trump, and FactCheck finds that Trump is crazier than we think.
FactCheck found the following:
- The Donald claims the president’s grandmother says Obama was born in Kenya. In fact, the recording to which he refers shows Sarah Obama repeatedly saying through a translator: “He was born in America.”
- The Donald claims that no hospital in Hawaii has a record of Obama’s birth. Hospital records are confidential under federal law, but Honolulu’s Kapi’olani Medical Center has published a letter from Obama calling it “the place of my birth,” thus publicly confirming it as his birthplace.
- The Donald insists that the official “Certification of Live Birth” that Obama produced in 2008 is “not a birth certificate.” That’s wrong. The U.S. Department of State uses “birth certificate” as a generic term to include the official Hawaii document, which satisfies legal requirements for proving citizenship and obtaining a passport.
- The Donald claims that there’s no signature or certification number on the document released by Obama. Wrong again. Photos of the document, which we posted in 2008, clearly show those details.
- The Donald says newspaper announcements of Obama’s birth that appeared in Hawaii newspapers in 1961 “probably” were placed there fraudulently by his now-deceased American grandparents. Actually, a state health department official and a former managing editor of one of the newspapers said the information came straight from the state health department.
- The Donald claims “nobody knew” Obama when he was growing up and “nobody ever comes forward” who knew him as a child. “If I ever decide to run, you may go back and interview people from my kindergarten,” Trump said. Well, two retired kindergarten teachers in a 2009 news story fondly recall teaching a young Barack Obama.
Recent polls have Trump leading in the field of misfits running for the Republican presidential nomination. Given that his entire campaign has so far been based on lies, it stands to reason that for Republicans, Teabaggers and Birthers, dealing in truth and reality disqualifies you from being their presidential candidate.
