So this morning Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump scammed the media yet again, with a sham press conference that was actually a big PR stunt for one of his new hotels (outraged at being played, pool photographers reportedly destroyed footage they took of the hotel). But squeezed in between his shameless hucksterism, Trump finally, belatedly, backed off the birther nonsense surrounding President Barack Obama that Trump has been pushing for years.

Here’s the Washington Post‘s take on the morning’s events:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday acknowledged for the first time that President Obama was born in the United States, ending his long history of stoking unfounded doubts about the nation’s first African American president but also seeking to falsely blame Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for starting the rumors. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean,” Trump said at his newly opened luxury hotel in Washington on Friday morning. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” This is not the first time that Trump has accused Clinton of first raising questions about Obama’s birthplace, an assertion that has been repeatedly disproved by fact-checkers who found no evidence that Clinton or her campaign questioned Obama’s birth certificate or his citizenship.

Sigh. You know what I want to see? A news story about a time when Trump told the truth about something. Seriously though, of course Trump lied about his racist birtherism and tried to pin the whole sordid BS on Hillary Clinton. What else would he do? Apologize? Take responsibility for his actions that legitimized a ridiculous conspiracy theory that was never anything other than fuel for white supremacists who wanted to tear down the nation’s first African-American president?

Hilarious.

For those of us in Hawaii, we must never forget that Trump pushed his birtherism to savage levels when he cynically, brutally manipulated the tragic death of state Health Department Director Loretta Fuddy in a December 2013 plane crash off Molokai to serve his racist, birther ends. To wit:

How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s “birth certificate” died in plane crash today. All others lived — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2013

In fact, Fuddy’s cause of death was an irregular heart beat, the Associated Press reported not long after the accident. But that’s irrelevant to Trump, then or now. Fuddy was no more a real person with real grieving family members to Trump than any of the rest of us. Nothing is real to Trump except his own brand–and drowning that brand in racist white supremacy is perfectly fine with Donald J. Trump.

Photo: MauiTime

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