Donald Trump's 'birther' rhetoric will haunt the Republican Party, Obama says. | Reuters Photos | AP Photos Trump draws Obama into 'birther' fray

President Barack Obama took on the “birther” issue that potential Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has yanked from the GOP’s fringe and thrust into the mainstream, saying it will backfire in a general election because people know he doesn’t “have horns” and want to focus on pocketbook issues.

Obama made the surprising comments, engaging directly with the birther theories that Trump has become patron saint of in the past month, in an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos.


When Stephanopoulos asked about Trump’s rise in the polls riding “fantasies” about the president’s place of birth, Obama paused before answering.

“I think that over the last two and a half years, there’s been an effort to go at me in a way that is politically expedient in the short term for Republicans but creates I think a problem for them when they want to actually run in the general election, where most people feel pretty confident the president was born where he says he was, in Hawaii,” Obama replied. “He doesn’t have horns.”

He said that what the American people are thinking is, “We want to know his plan on gas prices but we’re not really worrying about conspiracy theories or birth certificates and so I think it presents a problem for them.”

It’s the first time Obama has directly taken on the birther issue since it became a constant on cable news networks, thanks to the Trump bubble. Trump has ridden the issue hard, taking an issue that had largely been drummed out by Republican leaders — and repeatedly debunked by media and fact-checking outlets — and putting it in the spotlight.

The White House is elevating Trump by addressing the problem, on the one hand, and many believe it suits the Democrats’ political purposes to use the issue as a foil. At the same time, it speaks to the intensity the issue has taken on, and the risk of leaving it unaddressed.

Later at a campaign kickoff fundraiser in Chicago, Obama jokingly weighed in on the issue again.

“I was talking to a group earlier, and I said: ‘You know, I grew up here in Chicago. I wasn’t born here,’" Obama said, prompting laughter from his supporters. “Just want to be clear. I was born in Hawaii. But I became a man here in Chicago.”