Donald Trump revived his birther talk last night – egged on by Sean Hannity. On a Hannity show that was supposedly a forum for each of the Republican presidential candidates, Trump got the first half hour - while each of the participating candidates got just a few minutes in the second half of the show. It was as if even Hannity was acknowledging his lack of enthusiasm for the roster. And he made up for that with racially-tinged smears.
Leave it to white-rights enthusiast Hannity to nudge Trump into racial innuendo. Hannity gushed, “I think the most perceptive thing you ever said, and were willing to step out on a limb about, is when I last interviewed you and you said, ‘America does not know this man.’ The person that is presenting himself as this nice guy, if they knew the real Obama, what would America think?”
Trump took the cue and ran with it. “Well, he’s a much different people, person than people know and I have no doubt about that there are so many things that people don’t know about this man, where he comes from and…
Hannity interrupted to say, “You mean (where he comes from) philosophically.”
But Trump did not want to say that’s what he meant. And, frankly, it’s hard to believe that Hannity didn’t know that and wasn’t just covering his own derriere. Hannity has a very long record of cheering on Trump’s birtherism while pretending to distance himself from it.
Trump continued, “You can say the Manchurian candidate, I mean nobody knows anything about him: where he comes from, his education, how did he get into Columbia, if he had bad marks. How did he get into Harvard if he had bad marks? …There are so many things that people just don’t know. You go to Columbia and people don’t know who he is… We have a very strange situation going on.”
Well then, why didn’t Trump talk about what IS known about where Obama came from? It was Trump who boasted last April about an investigation he claimed to be conducting in Hawaii. He told the Today show, “I have people that actually have been studying (Obama’s birthplace) … And they cannot believe what they’re finding. And I’m serious—“
If Trump is really serious about these issues, why doesn’t he ever discuss the results of that investigation? And why doesn’t anyone on “fair and balanced,” “we report, you decide” Fox News ever ask?
Feel free to tweet Trump at @realDonaldTrump and ask (I do it just about every time I see him on TV). You can also email Hannity at [email protected] or tweet him @SeanHannity.