Donald Trump on Monday called ABC chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl's behavior the previous day "very dishonest."
Appearing on NewsMax TV's Steve Malzberg Show, Trump took issue with Karl claiming on ABC World News that he's "still raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
"They asked me a question about birther," Trump told Malzberg.
At that point, Malzberg told his guest that later on that evening, on World News, "Karl comes on and says, 'And Donald Trump is still talking about that birth certificate.' So that's misleading."
"Right," agreed Trump. "Totally misleading...He brought it up to me, and the next day I'm reading all over the place that I brought it up. It's just so dishonest, and I think people are aware of how dishonest the media can be. I mean, it's just shocking."
"And I said to him," Trump continued, "'I want to talk about China. I want to talk about OPEC. I want to talk about how this country is getting killed from an economic standpoint by virtually everybody we do business with.' And that's what I want to talk about when he brought up the whole thing on birther. But it was like 'Trump brings up the birther subject.'...Very dishonest."
Not surprisingly, Trump was right.
On ABC's This Week Sunday morning, it was indeed Karl who brought up Obama's birth certificate:
JONATHAN KARL: You said a lot of things over the years that people say just make you not serious. One of the big things is on the birth certificate.
After addressing the issue, Trump tried to move the discussion back to the economy, but Karl continued to press the birth certificate subject.
Later that day on ABC World News, Karl did a segment from Iowa talking about the 2016 presidential campaign.
Snippets of Karl's interview with Trump were shown before Karl said, “Believe it or not, Trump is still raising questions about President Obama’s birth certificate, the kind of thing that makes people question whether he can ever be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.”
Yet it wasn't Trump that raised this issue Sunday morning. It was indeed Karl himself.
Unfortunately, this seems to be standard operating procedure at ABC News.
Readers should recall George Stephanopoulos bringing up birth control at a Republican presidential debate in January 2012 despite this not being an issue during the campaign up to that point.
This of course metastacized into the Republican War on Women with everyone in the media piling on a contrived controversy.
What Karl did appears to be history repeating itself.
Now, to be fair, Trump could end all this birther discussion by simply saying that he has moved on and wants to now exclusively talk about what's ailing the nation.
However, it's clear that the media want to discuss the birther issue moving into the 2014 midterm elections in order to depict Republicans as being racist.
So I'm not sure there's anything Trump or anyone else can do to prevent this subject from being raised.
