President Obama in the Oval Office on Friday. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

President Obama on Friday scolded the news media for asking about Donald Trump’s latest flirtation with the racist “birther” movement the GOP nominee has long championed, telling reporters to focus on “more serious issues” in the 2016 race for the White House.

“I am shocked that a question like that has come up at a time when we have so many other things to do,” Obama said with evident annoyance in the Oval Office, before adding, “I’m not that shocked, actually; it’s fairly typical.”

But “we got other business to attend to,” the president said. “I was pretty confident about where I was born, I think most people were as well, and my hope would be that the presidential election reflects more serious issues than this.”

Obama’s comments came after Trump, who for years was a proponent of the discredited racist theory that the nation’s first black president was not born in the United States and may therefore be in office illegitimately, refused to say in a new story, published late Thursday, whether he had changed his mind.

“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Post. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

Not long after that coy answer, the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, told reporters in a statement that the Republican presidential nominee does not doubt that “President Obama was born in the United States.”

Obama spoke to the media at a White House meeting designed to shore up weak support in Congress for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. The president has made approval of the deal, a political long shot, a top priority of the end of his term.