Donald Trump again raises specter of violence against Hillary Clinton
One day after dropping his long-standing claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, a claim that fueled several conspiracy theories, Donald Trump has ignited two more.
Now he says his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was behind the so-called “birther movement.”
And for the second time in the presidential campaign, Trump is again raising the specter of violence against Clinton, this time joking about disarming her Secret Service agents.
CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett reports that after enjoying a rise in the polls and a week in which he stuck mostly to the script, it seems Trump is back to the flash-bang style of politics his supporters have come to enjoy.
But there was blowback on Saturday after the Republican nominee made another ad-libbed reference to violence and reignited controversy with a popular sitting president.
“I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons, they should disarm,” Trump said during a rally in Miami on Friday night.
Trump seemed to turn gun control into a threat against Clinton.
“Take their guns away,” Trump said. “She doesn’t want guns. Take their, let’s see what happens to her.”
This after a day spent walking back his refusal to admit that the nation’s first black president is an American-born citizen.
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” Trump said Friday morning in Washington.
Trump’s unwillingness a day earlier to make that same admission in a Washington Post interview gave new life to a conspiracy theory he has peddled since 2011.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump said on “The View.”
“You are not allowed to be a president if you’re not born in this country,” he told NBC News.
But Trump couldn’t help but trade one fiction for a new legend.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said Friday morning.
Neither Clinton nor anyone on her 2008 campaign claimed then-Sen. Barack Obama was not born in the United States, though some Clinton supporters spread the idea through anonymous emails.
It’s an issue even the president took a moment to address on Friday.
“I was pretty confident about where I was born,” Mr. Obama said in the Oval Office. “I think most people were as well.”
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus said Trump has moved beyond dogwhistle politics to the howls of wolves.
“We will not elect a chief bigot of the United States of America,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.
“Donald Trump is nothing more than a two-bit racial arsonist, who for decades has done nothing but fan the flames of bigotry and hatred,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York.
And his opponent wasted no time in holding Trump accountable for his years as myth-maker.
“Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple,” Clinton said at the Black Women’s Agenda Symposium, “and Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology.”
The media attention on these latest controversies has taken focus away from an investigation into Trump’s foundation by the New York attorney general, but all of this is likely to serve as material for Clinton at the first presidential debate on Sept. 26.