The Donald Trump presidential candidacy increasingly looks credible as a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey published last week had him at 17% among GOP primary voters, tied with Mike Huckabee and second only to Mitt Romney. Trump's candidacy appears to begaining momentum as the NBC/WSJ poll came shortly after one commissioned by CNN which had Trump at 10%. The billionaire New York real estate developer and reality star may have seen as increase in Republican support due to his promotion of one issue: Obama's birth.
While the press and the majority of the American public have long dismissed the allegation that President Obama is foreign-born as an unfounded conspiracy theory designed by disgruntled conservatives to discredit the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, a survey conducted by the Public Policy Polling center found that just a majority of Republicans, 51%, believe that President Obama was born overseas and thus constitutional eligible to be president. A further 21% are unsure about Obam's birth. The U.S. president was born in the state of Hawaii and has produced a birth certificate in that regard, along with dated newspaper clippings announcing his birth. There is no evidence for the claim, pronounced by "birthers", the media's designated term, that Obama was born in his father's nation of Kenya. And even Republican politicians have distanced themselves from the "birthers". Until Trump.
Donald Trump has fully thrown his lot in the with the "birthers" and recently eleborated on his suspicions in a letter to the editor in the New York Times. Trump wrote:
His grandmother from Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth. His family in Honolulu is fighting over which hospital in Hawaii he was born in-they just don't know.
He has not been able to produce a “birth certificate” but merely a totally unsigned “certificate of live birth”-which is totally different and of very little significance. Unlike a birth certificate, a certificate of live birth is very easy to obtain. Equally of importance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hussein Obama was born there-no bills, no doctors names, no nurses names, no registrations, no payments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in newspapers, many things could have happened, but some feel the grandparents put an ad in order to show that he was a citizen of the U.S. with all of the benefits thereto. Everybody, after all, and especially then, wanted to be a United States citizen.
Trump added that "there's at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherised Constitution!"
No survey has been published to guage what is responsible for Trump's rise in the polls amongst many Republicans, but his decision to ingratiate himself with "birthers", unlike other Republicans, may be part of the reason. Until now his candidacy had been dismissed as a public relations stunt, but his decision to take on the "birther" cause as his own and the excitement of "birthers" to see a high-profile endorser may be the cause for Trump's ascendency.
In that effort, he has earned the endorsement of Sarah Palin who recently told Fox News, "I appreciate that the Donald wants to spend his resources in getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americans. You know, more power to him. He's not just throwing stones from the sidelines, he's digging in, he's paying for researchers."
The Obama White House dismisses the idea of a President Trump and has described his "birther" comments as a “spectacle.” Senior White House advisor David Plouffe said on ABC, “There’s zero chance that Donald Trump would ever be hired by the American people to do this job.”
Trump responded to the White House in an interview with the New York Daily News, "I know for a fact that I am the only candidate they are concerned with.""They are very concerned because I am challenging him as to whether or not he was born in this country where there is a real doubt."
