Opinion: Birther issue made new once more

What is old is new again, at least in the world of politics.

Recently, Fox News host Jesse Watters made a quip questioning the veracity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate during a live edition of The Five.

Regardless of whether he was being intellectually dishonest or not, Watters presented the topic of Obama’s birth certificate as somehow fraught with political intrigue and announced he would be dispatching his producer to find out the truth. “That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate,” Watters told viewers. “This time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.”

Birtherism is the disproven argument that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and therefore not constitutionally eligible to be president. Birtherism proponents allege that Obama — who actually was born in Hawaii — was born in Kenya, his father’s country of birth. Trump himself helped spread birtherism, claiming years ago he had sent investigators to Hawaii.

Independent entities have investigated the subject numerous times over the years, and there remains no evidence to suggest Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen.

Why are these claims relevant now? Because Trump has espoused similar nonsensical, egregious claims relating to another non-white candidate, Kamala Harris, after Biden selected her as his running mate in 2020. Similar to his attacks on Obama, fact-checkers proved his assertions false.

It is important to note that in 2016, Donald Trump admitted what the rational and sane among us had always known. He conceded President Obama was born in the United States and was thus a legitimate American citizen. The twice-impeached, convicted felon’s belated admission supposedly answered all previous denunciations and skepticism and closed this long-running and rambling chapter.

Like virtually everything that involves Trump, the admission was not without controversy. Rather than admit he had engaged in perversely irresponsible behavior, he typically shifted the blame, targeting his then presidential rival Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff for creating such a foul rumor. Clinton quickly and effectively refuted any allegations that her campaign had anything to do with such sinister antics and denounced Trump as being disgraceful. To their credit, the mainstream media immediately supported Clinton’s claim that neither she nor her campaign was involved with the “President Obama is not an American” birther nonsense.

Speaking of the mainstream media, anyone who followed the story could witness the intense level of anger, annoyance, disgust, and resentment that reverberated on many news networks. Trump successfully manipulated the all too eager mainstream media to believe that he actually had “significant news” about President Obama’s citizenship status. Immediately afterward, it was evident that many reporters, news anchors, pundits, radio hosts, and others in the media felt as if they had received a painful kick in the stomach after realizing Trump had conned them. Numerous segments of the press were left wiping the egg off their faces and sucking their thumbs, both publicly and privately. It was simply a case of a master manipulator, a hotel promoter, playing them for fools.

Watters, Fox News, and many other right-wing media personalities have known for the better part of a decade the birther issue was and is a highly effective and perverse strategy to appeal to America’s most jingoistic voting electorate. It serves as red meat for the country’s most racially afflicted voters, feeding their sordid and largely unhinged psyches.

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. Contact him at:

[email protected]