Presidential aspirant and billionaire businessman Donald Trump, whose message on immigration is resonating among mainstream Americans – despite the fury of fellow Republicans, the press and Mexico – expressed doubts once again about the site of President Obama's birth, while answering a question from a CNN reported.
"I don't know. I really don't know," Trump said, when asked by CNN if he thought Obama had been born in America. "I don't know why he wouldn't release his records."
At the same time, Trump said he didn't want to make Obama's birth the focus of his presidential campaign.
"Honestly, I don't want to get into it," he said, the Hill reported. "I'm about jobs. I'm about the military. I'm about doing the right thing for this country."
Trump has been outspoken in the past about his doubts over Obama's place of birth – but he's hardly the only one. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio said in a radio interview just a few days ago he doubted the validity of Obama's birth certificate, released under pressure in 2011. As WND reported, Arpaio said on a Sunday chat on "Aaron Klein Investigative Radio" on New York's AM 970: "I've been in law enforcement 55 years. I think I know a fraudulent, fake document. I'm not a computer expert, I rely on my people. But I'm pretty well convinced it's a fake document."
The matter of Obama's birth surfaced generated more questions in late 2013, after a key official who provided a copy of the document Obama presented as his birth certificate – a document seen by some as fake – was killed in a plane crash. Hawaii's state Health Department chief Loretta Fuddy, who waived state prohibitions and turned over a copy of the document Obama released to the public, was killed in December 2013, as WND previously reported.
Just a few months before that crash, Trump had been pressing hard for proof of Obama's birth. In an August 2013 interview on "This Week" on ABC, he told host Jonathan Karl: "Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. I'm saying I don't know. Nobody knows."
Polls show many in the public still have doubts about Obama's birth. In February 2014, an Economist/YouGov poll showed 61 percent of those asked if "Obama was born in the United States" expressed doubts. And 15 percent in the same poll outright said they're positive Obama wasn't born in the country.
The significance is that the Constitution requires a president to be a "natural-born citizen," and there are those who say that would exclude someone who was born overseas. The Constitution itself does not define "natural-born citizen," but writings from the era when the Constitution was written suggest it would be the child of two citizen parents born in the country.