At some point before this past Friday, it dawned on Donald Trump and his aides that they couldn’t avoid a rendezvous with his birther destiny before voters go to the polls in November, and that his first debate with Hillary Clinton—what promises to be one of the most watched events in television history—was likely to be the place for it.

Their response to this realization has been one of the purest expressions of Trump’s extraordinary and alarming approach to politics since he launched his campaign last summer.

Despite the best efforts of his closest campaign surrogates to put the controversy to bed for him, Trump dismissed their birther-disavowals in a Wednesday interview with the Washington Post last week. He promised instead to take the issue head-on at a time of his choosing, to keep “the suspense going.” That time turned out to be Friday when he convened the media at his new hotel in Washington, D.C., in anticipation of a major announcement. Instead he forced a captive press corps to endure a nearly hourlong celebration of his hotel and campaign, before falsely blaming the entire birther movement on Hillary Clinton and grudgingly admitting that President Barack Obama had been born in the United States.

Trump used birtherism and other forms of racist agitation to build a political base for himself, and now that these defining crusades are impeding his pursuit of political power, he is trying to discard them in the most contemptuous and brazen possible way. Rather than disavow and apologize for his birtherism, he fabricated a new history in which Clinton had given life to the birther movement and he had merely settled the issue by forcing Obama to produce his birth certificate.

This is top-to-bottom fiction. Whatever ugliness Hillary Clinton lapsed into during the 2008 Democratic primary, she was never a birther, nor were here aides. Trump never once claimed until Friday that Clinton was the inspiration behind his birther campaign. To the contrary, he boasted in 2011 about having given fresh, mainstream life to the birther movement, and continued to suggest Obama might have been born outside the United States until this year.