Getty Clinton blasts Trump for refusing to say Obama was born in America

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton on Thursday night denounced her rival Donald Trump for his continuing refusal to admit President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

“He was asked one more time, 'Where was President Obama born?'” Clinton said to the audience at a black tie affair at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 39th awards gala. “And he still wouldn't say Hawaii. He still wouldn't say America. This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?”


Clinton was responding to an interview with Trump published by The Washington Post Thursday, in which the Republican nominee did not shut down his ongoing insinuations that Obama was not born in the U.S.

“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump told the Post. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

His campaign manager Kellyanne Conway recently tried to walk back his well-documented skepticism of the president's birthplace, saying that Trump now does, in fact, believe Obama was born in the United States.

But Trump seemed to walk back the walk back.

“I don’t talk about it anymore,” he said. “The reason I don’t is because then everyone is going to be talking about it as opposed to jobs, the military, the vets, security.”

On her first day back on the campaign trail after three days of recuperation from pneumonia, Clinton pointed to the comment as an example of Trump not being able to hide his true nature, even with a new team of consultants trying to sand off his most divisive edges.

“He's tried to reset himself and his campaign many times,” Clinton said. “This is the best he can do. This is who he is. We need to decide who we are.”

Clinton’s public re-emergence on Thursday was marked by a new vow to give "Americans something to vote for, not just against.” And in her remarks Thursday night, where she followed Obama and spoke with him in private backstage for about 15 minutes, she laid out two proposals she would enact in her first 100 days as president: making what she touts will be “the biggest investment in new good-paying jobs since World War II" and sending a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform to Congress.

But she also laid out the stakes of the election, now just 54 days away in terms of what's at stake if her opponent is elected. “If we just sigh and shake our heads and accept this,” she said, “what does that tell our kids about who we are? We need to stop him conclusively in November in an election that sends a message even he can hear.”

She added: “Donald Trump is running the most divisive campaign of our lifetime, his message is, you should be afraid ... There’s no innuendo or dog whistles anymore. It’s all right out there in the open now.”

Obama, in his own remarks, took a few sharp shots at Trump as well, jabbing the GOP nominee for calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" and for making the campaign "a little meaner, a little uglier."

"We’ve seen this kind of ugliness and anger and vitriol before," Obama went on. "That kind of politics sometimes may carry the day in the short term — I know that there are a lot of folks who had this notion of what the 'real America' looks like, and somehow it only includes a few of us. But who is going to decide who the real America is? Who is to determine that in this nation of immigrants, in a nation where, unless you are a Native American, you came here from somebody — someplace else — that you have a greater claim than anybody here?"