Then, Trump lied again when he said, “I finished it.” Even after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011 in an ugly split-screen spectacle, Trump was still tweeting the racist birther nonsense three years later. He was still winking and nodding at the issue on television as late as December 2015.

But most galling was what Trump didn’t say after declaring, “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.” He did not apologize.

Trump did not apologize to Obama for the personal insult that was the racist birther lie. Trump did not apologize to the nation for engaging in a racist exercise that sought to delegitimize the nation’s first black president. Trump did not apologize to African Americans in particular for dabbling in “othering” racism that is all too familiar and enraging.

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(I’m going to save my vitriol for the conspiracy of silence among leaders of the Republican Party that allowed the racist birther lie to fester and give Trump the national platform he needed to take over their party for another time.)

That Trump did not apologize just adds to the mockery that was his supposed outreach to black voters. Rather than take his message to the NAACP convention in July (an invitation he declined) or to the Black Women’s Agenda Symposium on Friday in Washington (an invitation he declined), Trump spoke to overwhelmingly white audiences. The signal was pretty clear to African Americans: It ain’t about you. It’s about them. Them being white voters turned off by Trump’s overt racism.

Trump has done and said many things that disqualify him as a potential president of the United States. His inability, daresay unwillingness, to ask forgiveness for stoking the racist birther lie says everything we need to know about Trump. That he is one national election away from sitting in the Oval Office because of that lie is a disgrace.