When the embarrassing “birther” episode of Donald Trump’s career was brought up tonight, Donald tried, once again, to create this narrative that Hillary Clinton started the birther controversy and he ended it. I won’t bore you with facts, or reminding you how unbelievable it is that a guy who didn’t believe our president was born in America is the Republican nominee for president—I’ll just give you Hillary Clinton’s perfect reply.
Well, just listen to what you heard and clearly, as Donald just admitted, he knew he was going to stand on this debate stage and Lester holt was going to be asking us questions so he tried to put the whole racist birther lie to bed. But it can't be dismissed that he's late. He has really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen. There was absolutely no evidence for it, but he persisted. He persisted year after year because some of his supporters, people that he was trying to bring into his fold apparently believed it or wanted to believe it. But remember, Donald started his career back in 1973 being sued by the justice department for racial discrimination. Because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy. He actually was sued twice by the justice department. So he has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.
And the birther lie was a very hurtful one. Barack Obama is a man of great dignity and I could tell how much it bothered him and annoyed him that this was become touted and used against him. But I like to remember what Michelle Obama said in her amazing speech at our democratic national convention, when they go low, we go high. And Barack Obama went high, despite Donald Trump's best efforts to bring him down.
Donald Trump is a racist. He’s always been a racist, he always will be a racist. But don’t worry, he also doesn’t respect the people voting for him either, so in that way he’s colorblind.