Whatever Trump said yesterday, his supporters know he’s privately agreed with them all along.
MIAMI—Many of Donald Trump’s supporters at his raucous rally here Friday night still believe President Obama was born in Kenya. “I know it in my heart,” said Pedro Almeyda, an elevator engineer. Others still aren’t sure. “He doesn’t show love for this country, but who knows?” asked Carmen Suarez, a retired nurse
.. Clinton has not run ads or focused her speeches on his flip-flops, in part because she fears voters will assume he really believes the position they agree with.
.. Birthers like Fermin Vazquez, a disabled veteran from nearby Coral Gables, suggested that Trump is now fibbing to tamp down the media frenzy, even though he secretly believes Obama is a foreigner. “He knows the truth, but he’s got to follow the rules to get elected,” Vazquez said.
.. Marlon Montero, a student and Trump volunteer, never believed the birther falsehoods, and he’s convinced Trump never believed them either. He suggested the innuendo that worked in the Republican primary was no longer working, so Trump is wisely dropping it. “When you’re running for president, you need media attention, and Mr. Trump got it when he needed it,” Montero said. “He knows what he’s doing.”
.. Both birthers (who were often well-versed in Internet conspiracy theories about Obama’s Kenyan half-brother) and non-birthers (who tended to grin and roll their eyes about those theories) agreed that Democrats nervous about Clinton’s recent poll numbers concocted the latest media storm over the president’s roots. And neither group seemed to be persuaded or bothered by Trump’s eleventh-hour conversion.
.. “Obama’s a communist. His mother and father were communists. For sure he was born in Kenya,” Almeyda said. “I guess Trump had to say he wasn’t, for politics. But remember, it was Trump who asked for Obama’s birth certificate. He knows.”
.. Millie Cagol, a housewife in Coral Gables, said Trump is a provocateur, not a racist, describing the initial birth certificate demand as a combination of savvy politics and due diligence. Now that the political winds have shifted, and the due diligence is long done, Cagol figures Trump is free to tell the truth. “He just did it to get attention and stir people up. And I think he likes to see things on paper,” Cagol said. “Anyway, he’s moving on.”
..“I wasn’t there when he was born,” Lazano said. “But I’ll tell you this: I know for a fact that he’s a Muslim.”
O’Reilly: ‘You can’t second-guess’ Trump’s birther strategy
Bill O’Reilly brushed aside Donald Trump’s refusal to say earlier Friday whether he was going to disavow his questioning of President Barack Obama’s citizenship, saying, “you can’t second-guess the strategy that has him tied with Hillary Clinton, who should be ahead by 15 points.”
“I wouldn’t have done it this way, but I would have put it to bed a long time ago,” O’Reilly said in a telephone interview on Fox News in the minutes preceding Trump’s speech in Washington.
Trump punks the media
The Republican nominee scores free airtime to promote his new hotel and veterans’ endorsements after promising an announcement on his birther obsession.
The media took the bait. The cable networks offered wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s plane taxiing at Reagan National Airport (cozying near Hillary Clinton’s own “Stronger Together” jet). With Trump running late for the 10 a.m. news conference, the image of an empty podium was flashed for more than an hour. And when Trump finally did appear, he got more than 20 minutes of free airtime promoting his new Washington hotel and showcasing endorsements from Medal of Honor recipients.
Only after that extended infomercial did Trump deliver the goods — a speedy statement that Obama was indeed born in the United States, coupled with a blatantly false accusation that Hillary Clinton started the conspiracy to begin with.
The media got punked.
“It’s hard to imagine this as anything other than a political Rick-roll,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper vented on air after Trump’s hotel event. His colleague John King followed up with, “We just got played.”.. “He opened the event making a plug for his hotel, he has a new hotel so in a sense, you could say he was leveraging five years of birther conspiracy to promote his hotel. Now we have been listening to veterans and military officials praising Donald Trump. He has lined up quite a bit of support onstage.”
.. It was a cunning move on Trump’s part — entice the media with a topic that was dominating the news cycle, package it with a promotion for his brand new hotel, and then add in bona fide military heroes and Medal of Honor recipients, for whom cutting away from quickly could be viewed as disrespectful.
.. but there’s the competing feeling that news organizations have almost let too much slide to have any bargaining power at this point,”
.. “The TV pool traditionally doesn’t participate in events that our reporters or producers are not allowed to attend.”
.. “Right now, Trump has it all,” the Washington Post’s Robert Costa said on MSNBC on Friday morning. “He has his property debuting in D.C. He’s on every network. He’s at the center.”
Donald Trump’s Description of Black America Is Offending Those Living in It
Dogged by suggestions that he is running a racist campaign, Mr. Trump has been speaking about and expressing concern for black voters more in the past week than at any other point in his presidential run.
But he has been doing so in front of nearly all-white audiences.
.. some African-Americans who have been listening say the picture Mr. Trump has been painting of black America — a nightmare of poverty, death and danger, brought about by failed Democratic policies and leadership — is unrecognizable.
.. “You could go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting, and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities,” Mr. Trump said in Akron.
.. His sales pitch can also sound bluntly dismissive.
“What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?” he asked a crowd in Virginia on Saturday. “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”
.. His credibility problems with blacks stem in part from his role in leading the so-called birther movement that questioned President Obama’s birthplace, an attempt to delegitimize Mr. Obama’s presidency that offended great numbers of African-Americans.
.. Mr. Morial, of the Urban League, noted that the group had invited Mr. Trump to attend briefings on its policy concerns, but that he had declined.