Needless to say, the media were besides themselves on Friday in turning up the outrage machine at Donald Trump for dragging out his birtherism statement and aside from his lack of an apology for perpetuating the asinine belief about President Obama, few were willing to own up to their role in going along with Trump’s media circus.
After Trump had spent over 20 minutes having various veterans who have endorsed him speak, CNN butted in briefly until Trump returned to the podium and The Lead/State of Union host Jake Tapper was (rightly) not amused.
Tapper was speaking to At This Hour co-hosts John Berman and Kate Bolduan when he dropped a Rick-roll reference to perfectly encapsulate the media giving Trump their undivided attention (as they did throughout the primary to the detriment of his primary opponents):
[W]hile these American heroes are, you know, people that we should all show reverence and respect, they are much greater men than Rick Astley, it's hard to imagine this as anything other than a political rick roll, the idea that we were told this was going to be Donald Trump addressing something that his top campaign advisers, many people in the Republican National Committee, want him to address and clear up, and then stop talking about, which is this lie that President Obama was not born in the United States[.]
“We were told he was going to do that and instead, they bring out a number of Medal of Honor recipients and military heroes instead and it was very clever on one level, on another level it does speak to the integrity of the Trump campaign. They told us something was going to happen and it's not happening,” Tapper added.
Trump eventually took to the microphone and offered a short statement that he now believes the President was born in the United States and once that ended, CNN’s Inside Politics host John King reminisced about how he interviewed Trump shortly after the President released his long-form birth certificate years ago before confessing that the billionaire “played” the media:
So I really don't quite know what to make of that except for that we got played again by the Trump campaign which is what they do. He got a live event broadcast for, what, 20 something minutes. Kate, you were keeping the count and Jake is absolutely right. We should all have great respect and reverence for those military heroes who are now making a political choice just as the military heroes who made a different political choice and support Hillary Clinton. It’s no disrespect to any of those heroes who served our country and continue to serve our country in different ways, but we just got played. We just got played and voters can decide what to make of that.
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Tapper soon echoed King’s comments and placed Trump’s birtherism obsession along with the equally obscene (but less so in the media’s eyes at the time) conspiracy theory that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had something to do with the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Tapper also made clear to point out that Clinton supporters did indeed float egregious theories back in the 2008 primary against Obama, but Clinton never uttered it herself:
We should point out that of the statement he said Hillary Clinton and her campaign started the birther movement, I ended it, those are two factually false statements. Hillary Clinton's campaign did make attempts to other-ize Barack Obama during the 2007-2008 campaign talking about his foreign roots, talking about ways in which he might not necessarily be perceived as being rooted in this country. They never mentioned his birth certificate. That never happened by Hillary Clinton. That never happened by the Hillary Clinton campaign...The people who supported Hillary Clinton that put out a whole bunch of garbage about Barack Obama, that was reprehensible, and maybe somebody will ask Secretary Clinton about that[.]
Of course, the thorough and serious nature of journalists like King and Tapper were quickly replaced by panels and other hosts expressing outrage at what they had seen and promised to stay on the story. As a personal aside, one can’t help but find this echo chamber to be quite amusing.
The relevant portions of the transcript from CNN’s At This Hour with Berman and Bolduan on September 16 can be found below.
CNN’s At This Hour with Berman and Bolduan
September 16, 2016
11:27 a.m. EasternJAKE TAPPER: Sure and while these American heroes are, you know, people that we should all show reverence and respect, they are much greater men than Rick Astley, it's hard to imagine this as anything other than a political rick roll, the idea that we were told this was going to be Donald Trump addressing something that his top campaign advisers, many people in the Republican National Committee, want him to address and clear up, and then stop talking about, which is this lie that President Obama was not born in the United States, which has been discredited for more than half a decade now, but Donald Trump has been trafficking in it as recently as this year. We were told he was going to do that and instead, they bring out a number of Medal of Honor recipients and military heroes instead and it was very clever on one level, on another level it does speak to the integrity of the Trump campaign. They told us something was going to happen and it's not happening.
(....)
JOHN KING: He was born in Hawaii, yes. I actually don't know what to say here. I had the great good fortune if you want to call it that of interviewing Donald Trump, the interview was he previously scheduled, on the very day Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate and on that day, Donald Trump said he had done the country a great service after he had done the country a great disservice by becoming the chief cheerleader for a fraud, a birther movement trying to delegitimize the sitting United States President. So I really don't quite know what to make of that except for that we got played again by the Trump campaign which is what they do. He got a live event broadcast for, what, 20 something minutes. Kate, you were keeping the count and Jake is absolutely right. We should all have great respect and reverence for those military heroes who are now making a political choice just as the military heroes who made a different political choice and support Hillary Clinton. It’s no disrespect to any of those heroes who served our country and continue to serve our country in different ways, but we just got played. We just got played and voters can decide what to make of that. You are right, Hillary Clinton's campaign never advanced it. Supporters of hers did and what those supporters did was reprehensible. But it was not the campaign itself and there you got after, what, four or five years of leading a fraudulent, reckless campaign against the legitimacy of the United States President, you got about, what, six or seven words from Donald Trump saying he's decided it's over. I guess he gets to decide that.
(....)
TAPPER: We should point out that of the statement he said Hillary Clinton and her campaign started the birther movement, I ended it, those are two factually false statements. Hillary Clinton's campaign did make attempts to other-ize Barack Obama during the 2007-2008 campaign talking about his foreign roots, talking about ways in which he might not necessarily be perceived as being rooted in this country. They never mentioned his birth certificate. That never happened by Hillary Clinton. That never happened by the Hillary Clinton campaign. I covered it at the time. John's right. The people who supported Hillary Clinton that put out a whole bunch of garbage about Barack Obama, that was reprehensible, and maybe somebody will ask Secretary Clinton about that, but she and her campaign never, never started the birther issue. Second, Donald Trump did not end the birther issue. He takes credit for President Obama being pressured to release his birth certificate in 2011, and if you want to give him credit for that, I suppose you can. That said, there really was never any question about whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States, in Hawaii, in 1961. There were contemporaneous newspaper mentions of his birth. There were never any serious questions as to whether or not he was born in Hawaii. It was a crackpot conspiracy theory. Donald Trump fueled it and then after Barack Obama released his birth certificate, Donald Trump said that it was fraudulent or suggested it was fraudulent, and he kept up this birther nonsense long after 2011, as recently as this year, he was suggesting that he had his thoughts about what birtherism was. Last year, he was talking about how he didn't think the birth certificate was real and let's get into why this is important beyond the fact that it's a conspiracy theory, not unlike the conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz's dad had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, something else that Donald Trump put forward this year. This is significant because many people, including many African-Americans, think that the attempt to say that Barack Obama, the first African-American President, was born in Africa and was not eligible for the presidency, was not a real American, was not quote, unquote, one of us, that that whole campaign was racist. There are a great many people who feel that very passionately and to act as though this is over like that is a disservice to those people who were greatly, personally offended by the whole birther movement and John King put it right when he said that he was, Donald Trump was the lead cheerleader for that movement.
