The president was loath to lend validity to the debate. His sudden decision to share the document caught Washington sleeping, as broadcast networks scrambled to interrupt programming with the news bulletin.5 “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said inside the White House Briefing Room. “We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do.”
The annoyance in his voice was reserved for one heckler above the rest, the man whose image was now being shown in a split screen next to Obama on the cable channels: Donald J. Trump.
The sixty-four-year-old billionaire, a real estate mogul and star of NBC’s hit show The Apprentice, had been a fixture of American pop culture for decades. His brand was lent to books and beauty pageants, his name splayed garishly across buildings, commodities, and golf courses. The son of a successful Queens developer, Trump carried a perpetual sense of insecurity in regard to the Manhattan nobility and was determined to make noise with his money, investing in schemes and projects befitting his flamboyant persona. Standing six foot three, with a vulgar New York brogue and his trademark mane of tumid blond, Trump rarely lacked for attention.
He was a latecomer to the birther movement. In fact, he had first commented publicly on Obama’s citizenship just a month earlier, during an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America. Trump called the circumstances surrounding Obama’s birthplace “very strange,” adding, “The reason I have a little doubt—just a little—is because he grew up and nobody knew him.”6
This was not true. Obama’s upbringing on the big island was thoroughly documented by friends and family members, not to mention verified by journalists and academics. But that didn’t stop Trump from peddling falsehoods, with increasing certainty, in the days that followed. On ABC’s The View, he asked, “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On Fox News, he said Obama “spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue.” On Laura Ingraham’s radio show, he said of the certificate, “Somebody told me . . . that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’” And on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Trump announced that Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya, and I was there, and I witnessed the birth.’ Now, she’s on tape. I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon.”
In fact, the tape features Obama’s grandmother stating repeatedly that she did not witness the future president’s birth because it occurred in Hawaii and she lived in Kenya. But facts had never stood in the way of conservatives’ theorizing about Obama’s shadowy past: How he was raised by his radical father (who actually had abandoned the family when his son was two years old); how he inherited an anticolonial bias from living in Kenya (he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia after his mother remarried); how he was a Muslim (despite being baptized in 1998 and writing extensively about accepting Christ after being raised by his nonbelieving grandparents).
Trump would later claim that he never truly believed that Obama was born outside the United States. But Boehner, a frequent golfing buddy, says Trump absolutely did. “Oh yes. Oh yes. He wouldn’t have spent the money to send people to Hawaii and do the investigation if he didn’t believe it.”
Trump’s true beliefs, his intentions, his motivations—none of it really mattered. The fact of it was, he could say whatever he felt like, whenever he felt like it, and suffer no consequences. He was a superstar, a brand-name television personality who had spent decades mastering the game of media manipulation. He didn’t care if what he said about the president of the United States was unintelligible or factually inaccurate; it would be covered and covered widely.
This was America circa 2011, a nation seduced by celebrity and blissfully unaware of the cancerous effects. That year, another reality television personality, Kim Kardashian, whose career was launched by her role in a leaked sex tape, married basketball player Kris Humphries (not her costar in said tape) in a televised ceremony that drew north of four million viewers.7 When the couple filed for divorce seventy-two days later, it was reported that they profited off their nuptials, having sold their wedding photos to People magazine for $1.5 million in addition to receiving the substantial TV royalties. (This, more than any activism on the left, made the case for gay marriage.)
Trump was one of the few people alive who could compete for ratings with the Kardashians. Not coincidentally, the surge of controversy—and publicity—surrounding his birther gambit accompanied the news that Trump was considering a presidential run. Again.
He first flirted with a bid for the White House in 1987, after publishing his best-selling book The Art of the Deal. Trump’s message over the next three decades would prove fairly consistent—and in certain cases, quite prescient.
“I’d make our allies pay their fair share,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1988. “I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off.”
Two years later, talking to Playboy about the president, Trump said, “I like George [H. W.] Bush very much and support him and always will. But I disagree with him when he talks of a kinder, gentler America. I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.” (In that same interview, he predicted, “The working guy would elect me. He likes me.”)
And in 1999, he told Larry King, “I think that nobody’s really hitting it right. The Democrats are too far left. . . . The Republicans are too far right. I don’t think anybody’s hitting the chord.”
Trump came closest to pulling the trigger in 2000. Encouraged by former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s winning Minnesota’s governorship as a member of the Reform Party, Trump launched an exploratory committee and changed his party registration in October 1999. Testing the waters, he described himself as “very pro-choice” and “very liberal when it comes to health care.”8 He also called for tighter immigration restrictions and new trade deals. Perhaps most memorable was his feverish five-month assault on Pat Buchanan, the populist favorite who challenged Bush in the 1992 GOP primary and was now running for the Reform nomination. Trump called the “anti-Semite” Buchanan a “Hitler-lover” who “doesn’t like the blacks” and “doesn’t like the gays.”9 Before dropping his candidacy in February 2000, Trump warned of Buchanan’s alleged extremism, “We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears.”10
Eleven years later, Trump would do something wildly out of character: apologize. Placing a telephone call to Buchanan one day, out of the blue, he told his former rival that he had been wrong to label him a racist. He even asked for forgiveness. Buchanan was stunned.
It was around the time of the Buchanan call, of course, that Trump was kicking off his birther crusade—and pondering once more a campaign for the presidency.
The prospect of Trump running in 2012 jolted the GOP. The expected Republican field was doing little to excite conservatives; Mitt Romney, the right-wing darling of 2008 and the presumed 2012 front-runner, was bleeding support thanks to the attention Obamacare had drawn to the program he had piloted in Massachusetts. Against this backdrop, Trump sent shudders through the party establishment when he accepted an invitation to address the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2011.