First Lady Michelle Obama, who was greeted with chants of “four more years!” when she took the podium at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Fairfax, Virginia on Friday, used her speech to hit back at Donald Trump for his history of birtherism against her husband. Looking back at the 2008 election, the first lady said people had “all kinds of questions” about what kind of president her husband would be. “Things like, ‘Will he understand us?’ ‘Will he protect us?’ And then, of course, there were those who questioned and continue to question for the past eight years, up through this very day,” she said, without mentioning Trump’s name, “whether my husband was even born in this country.” Obama said the president has “answered those questions” by “going high when they go low” and “with the progress that we've achieved together.”
During a Washington, D.C. press conference earlier in the day that mainly focused on his new hotel in that city, Trump finally said the words, “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.” But in the next breath, he peddled a new lie: That Hillary Clinton “started the birther controversy” and he “finished it” in 2011 by forcing Obama to release his long-form birth certificate. There is no record of Clinton pushing those rumors during the 2008 race and Trump was refusing to acknowledge the president was born in this country as recently as earlier this morning.
