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This was not dog-whistle racism; Trump was shouting it out. As The New York Times argued, Trump was waging nothing less than a “campaign” around these lies, and it was impossible to imagine that this line of attack on Obama “as the insidious ‘other’ would have been conducted against a white president.” And because Trump was getting the attention he wanted, he kept going. He was able to command a national audience, and the press he craved, for a barefaced lie encoding a racist message.

Trump did so well that in April 2011, the White House obtained and released additional documentation: the “long-form” birth certificate. At the time, I was serving as White House counsel and was charged with coordinating the acquisition of the form. It was not the “official” birth certificate the Obama campaign had publicly posted years before. Long forms contain more information, such as the ages and birthplaces of the parents and the name of the hospital, but they are not more authoritative than the official certificate in confirming the date and location of birth.

By acquiring and releasing this document, the White House might have been taken to be conceding that what it had previously put out was not adequate or reliable. It was not conceding anything of the sort. But it faced a problem: Reporters had begun pressing for the White House to find and produce the long form, as if this were the response that the president reasonably owed his accuser.

Somehow it was thought foolish to ignore the lies and the message they conveyed. No responsible observer or member of the press doubted the official birth certificate, and there were other pieces of corroborating evidence, such as the birth notice that had appeared in the Hawaiian press. This was, perversely, deemed insufficient. President Obama supposedly needed to do more to quiet the birthers and their most vocal national spokesperson, Donald Trump.

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The view that Obama needed to go the extra mile began spreading to surprising quarters. The MSNBC news-show host Chris Matthews had no patience for the lies of the birther movement, yet he memorably expressed bewilderment that the president had so far resisted providing the public with the long form. In no way questioning that Obama had been born in the United States, Matthews nevertheless wondered on air, “Why has the president himself not demanded that they put out the initial [long-form] documents?” Matthews counseled that the president “should just say, ‘Send me a copy right now.’”

A reasonable response to the question might have been that Trump’s mendacious, race-based hectoring did not merit a response from the president of the United States. Trump had not raised a legitimate question because there was no such question to be raised. He had just stated and tweeted unsupportable suggestions that the president had been born overseas and was covering it up. Trump rested what passed for allegations on “what somebody told me,” or what he knew from “people who have been studying [the birthplace],” or the belief of “many people” that the official certificate was not genuine. He declared in March 2011 that “a lot of facts … are emerging.” Replace facts with lies in that sentence, and he would have at long last told a truth. And he was the leading liar, the most notorious and well covered of the lot.