Donald Trump's campaign manager maintains birtherism is Hillary Clinton's fault

Kellyanne Conway
(Image credit: The Associated Press)

Birtherism is a smear against President Obama that was started by Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, Donald Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, insisted in an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday, citing several Clinton staffers who reportedly entertained or promoted the conspiracy theory.

Conway was speaking in response to Trump's recent concession that Obama was born in the United States. "This started with Hillary Clinton's campaign, No. 1," she said. "No. 2, it was Donald Trump who put the issue to rest when he got President Obama to release his birth certificate years later. And, No. 3, he said that 'President Obama was born in this country, period.'"

Todd wasn't satisfied, however, and pressed Conway on why "two wrongs make a right in this case," arguing that birther allegations were a major feature of Trump's public persona for years and highlighting the Trump campaign's recent labeling of birtherism as a "smear."

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"The only people still obsessed about this," Conway retorted, is the media.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.