Despite evidence to the contrary, the president of the United States reportedly still believes that his predecessor, Barack Obama, is not, and never was, an American citizen.

The New York Times reports that Trump has been bringing up the birther issue in private meetings of late. 

One senator the president outlined his doubts to reportedly “chuckled” as he told the Times about the matter.

If you’ll recall, back in the Obama years, a vocal group of people who came to be known as “birthers” challenged Obama’s status as an American citizen.

Donald Trump was one of these people. He would often tweet about his concerns that someone who was not an American by birth was running the country.

Unlike the current president, then-president Obama caved to public pressure to release private documents, and let the whole world see his birth certificate.

Once Obama released his certificate, much of the outrage over his status died down.

Donald Trump, however, refused to give up the ghost, tweeting almost a year after Obama released his certificate that the document “is a fraud.”

 

A few years later, Trump brought the matter back up, and began taking credit for getting Obama to release his birth certificate.

He later pivoted, suggesting again that the document President Obama released for review was fake, and that if Obama’s college records were examined, the world would find out that he was not actually American after all.

 

During his campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump added a new layer to the whole debacle, arguing, as Quartz reminds us, that it was Clinton who started the whole birther movement. 

As The Week reports, a journalist said that he got an image of Obama in Somali garb from the Clinton campaign during her primary against Obama, but there has never been any evidence showing the two-time candidate for president had anything to do with the birthers.

The Times reports, too, that Obama’s birth certificate isn’t the only thing Trump has maintained is fake in recent weeks. The president now claims that the famous Access Hollywood tape on which he can be heard bragging about conducting serial, criminal sexual assault is fake.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” the president reportedly told a senator despite having admitted during the campaign that that is indeed him on the tape.

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