What is this? A birth certificate story in 2018?
It's been more than seven years since Donald Trump dispatched his birth certificate "investigators" to Hawaii to find proof that President Obama was not born in America.
What happened to them? Are they still there? Are their mummified bodies collecting dust in some cheap hotel room?
The Daily Beast has a report on Trump's tabloid publishing buddies running garbage for Trump (and protecting him from it) and, about halfway down the report, Trump's singular birth certificate investigator is identified as a National Enquirer reporter.
And Trump isn't the one who sent him. It was the owner of the National Enquirer, David Pecker.
According to colleagues in [American Media Inc] Los Angeles bureau, ace reporter Rick Egusquiza—the man who broke the John Edwards love-child scandal—was dispatched to the 50th state to prove that there was indeed something fishy about President Obama’s birth certificate.
[Former] AMI staffers speculate that David Pecker boasted to Trump about Egusquiza’s Hawaii trip, and Trump, on the Today show, was referring to the Enquirer’s man in Honolulu. [...]
“Rick was ordered to Hawaii and told, ‘Don’t come back until you get something to prove the birth certificate isn’t real,’” said former Radar Online Editor Maxine Page, who described herself as a friend of Egusquiza. “But he couldn’t prove that, because it was real.”
In the end, Egusquiza came back with interviews with the president’s childhood acquaintances and photos of the young Obama—including one of him as a toddler in a pirate’s costume—that the reporter managed to find at the apartment complex where his grandmother had lived.
We knew Trump's "investigators" wouldn't find anything because President Obama really was born in Hawaii, but one thing that had never occurred to me before is that Trump wasn't really the one who sent them.
Like nearly everything else in his life, Trump was taking credit for someone else's initiative and even the racist movement that spawned his modern political career was not solely his idea.
In hindsight, this feels obvious.
It amuses me to think that former birther posse Sheriff Joe Arpaio has carried the torch for this scam for nearly a decade believing that it was genuine when it was a cynical right wing media hoax from the very beginning. Trump knew that but he never told his buddies in Arizona because he benefited from it.