Trump Tweets That Obama's Birth Certificate Is "A Fraud" One Year After Its Release

On August 6, 2012, Donald Trump tweets: "An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud." The tweet comes 15 months after the White House released Obama's long-form Hawaiian birth certificate and 11 months after Obama publicly mocked Trump's fixation at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner while Trump sat stone-faced in the audience. Trump offers no evidence for the fraud claim. He continues publicly questioning Obama's birthplace through 2014, when he suggests Obama's college records would reveal his true "place of birth." Trump finally acknowledges Obama was born in the United States on September 16, 2016 — only after his campaign recognizes the issue is damaging his outreach to Black voters. Colin Powell, in hacked emails, calls Trump's birther campaign "racist." Bernie Sanders says it was "about delegitimizing the first African-American president in our history."