Reader question:
Please explain this sentence: “Donald Trump is a…birther and bully.” Birther? Really?
My comments:
I get you. Is “birther” even a word?
Well, it is a relatively new coinage and if you follow American politics, you’ll be able to pick this word up in no time.
“No time” is an exaggeration but the truth is, “birther” does come up in the news now and then, quite often actually in the current US election cycle.
First, definitions.
Birther is a word referring to a person who doubts the birthplace of President Barack Obama. Birthers, as these people are known, don’t believe Obama was born in Hawaii. They claim he was born in Kenya or elsewhere.
The long and short of it is, if he was not born in Hawaii, hence America, he would not be eligible to run for the Presidency in accordance with the constitution.
Birthers came onto the scene in 2008, when Obama first joined the fray to run to become the first black American President.
Oh, Obama is black. I should’ve mentioned this fact sooner because the fact that Obama is African American sums everything up. He is black and many white Americans don’t want to see someone of that skin color lead their country.
Their country.
Yeah, that’s about it. Many conservative white Americans just could not accept it, and so they got the rumor mill moving. Had Obama been a pale face (as Native Indians used to call whites), then nobody would’ve raised an eyebrow – and so you know this is actually more about race than the constitution.
Anyways, Donald Trump, one of the many candidates running for presidential nomination from the Republican Party (Obama is a Democrat), is such a birther.
And a bully.
A bully is someone who bullies, of course. In school, a bully is a big boy who frightens a smaller pupil into submission by ordering them around or beating them up physically and generally treating them rudely and brutally.
Donald Trump is rich, white and conservative at heart and therefore a good representative of white conservative America.
He’s probably of the opinion that he is above Obama’s company, if we really get down to it.
Anyways, birthers don’t have a real argument to make. They’re probably just moaning the death of the white America of yesteryear.
That’s my generalization on the subject of birthers and their politics, or the lacks thereof. And as generalizations go, you should keep in mind that a generalization is just that, a generalization.
In other words, I may be all wrong on any particular point.
Follow American politics, then, and find everything out by yourself.
Here are media examples involving birthers:
1. Thanks to the tenacity of Lou Dobbs, Pat Boone and “birthers” everywhere, the idea that President Barack Obama is not in fact a natural born American citizen persists. But a 378-0 vote on the Hill has struck a blow to their cause.
G. Gordon Liddy, notorious Nixon henchman, spoke on behalf of birthers everywhere during an appearance on Hardball with Christ Matthews earlier in the week, when he declared that not only is Obama not an American-born citizen, the president is, in fact, an illegal alien.
This helped set the stage for the showdown that took place in Washington,, D.C.
Rep. Neil Abercrombie, (D-Hawaii), introduced Monday House Resolution 593 (PDF), “Recognizing and celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the entry of Hawaii into the Union as the 50th State... Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii.”
Normally this sort of boiler plate goes on uncontested. But as Rep. Elijah Cummings was about to declare the resolution passed by a voice vote, the proceedings were interrupted by Republican Rep. Michelle Bachman.
“Mr. Speaker? Mr. Speaker? I object to the vote on the grounds that a quorum is not present and make a point of order that a quorum is not present,” said the atypically soft spoken congresswoman from Minnesota.
Cummings had no choice but to delay further action on the resolution that would have put Republican Representatives in the position of making a vote that would implicitly force them to acknowledge that the Commander in Chief was in fact a natural born citizen or explain why they refused to celebrate Hawaii’s 50th anniversary.
Once the House finally had a quorum later in the day, all 378 members of Congress in attendance voted Yea.
- Birthers of a Nation Suffer Terrible Blow, NBCMiami.com, July 27, 2009.
2. Investigating the roots of the Obama birthplace conspiracy theory, John Avlon—author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, available now from Beast Books—uncovers the first Birther and finds she’s a Hillary Clinton supporter also implicated in Dan Rather’s exit from CBS.
Plus, read more on Avlon’s new book.
The Birthers were back in force at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville.
WorldNet Daily founder Joseph Farah used his prime-time speaking slot, broadcast on C-Span, to pump up claims that President Obama was not born in the United States—and received enthusiastic applause from the audience. Birther queen Orly Taitz was in the house, making the rounds as a celebrity conspiracy theorist.
The persistence of this much-debunked rumor is a reminder of how the fringe is blurring with the base in American politics. It provoked conservative Internet impresario Andrew Breitbart into a confrontation with Farah, the new guard vs. the old, with Breitbart arguing that attempts to prove Obama was born abroad are stupid and self-destructive, “a losing issue.”
“I determined that I was going to start digging up every bit of dirt that I could find on him and…convince the Democratic Party to dump him and make Hillary the nominee.”
- The ‘Birthers’ Began on the Left, TheDailyBeast.com, February 8, 2010.
3. The political alliance between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, consummated in February with a very awkward handshake, is about to get even closer. Romney is headed to Las Vegas on Tuesday for a Trump-hosted fund-raiser, the campaign is holding a fund-raising lottery for the chance to eat dinner with Trump (possibly at Famous Famiglia), and Trump is thinking about forming his own Romney-supporting super-PAC. Clearly, Trump is good for Romney’s bank account. But he also remains, to this day, a very confident, very unapologetic, very embarrassing birther:
“Look, it’s very simple,” said Trump ...
“A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book,” Trump went on, “he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”
“That’s what he told the literary agent,” Trump insisted. “That’s the way life works … He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said … He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”
- How Much Longer Can Mitt Romney and Donald Trump Stay Pals? NYMag.com, May 25, 2017.
About the author:
Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.