With or without Donald Trump, the Republican party is now the Birther Party. I certainly wouldn't defend Trump under any circumstances, but I would like to point out that he is simply playing the game that was already established before he arrived at the crime scene.
A new poll released today by the New York times and CBS shows that 69% of Republican voters either believe president wasn't born in the United States or they aren't sure.
A plurality of Republican voters, 47 percent, said they believed Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was born in another country; 22 percent said they did not know where he was born, and 32 percent said they believed he was born in the United States.
A separate poll released last week by Public Policy Polling also found that a full 23 percent of Republican voters would not cast their ballot for a candidate who believes the president is an American citizen.
The truth is you can't spend four years whipping up the base by encouraging their racist-worldviews through various winks and nods and then expect them to nominate someone reasonable when the time comes to do so. It just doesn't work that way. Donald Trump may have captured the spotlight right now, but the entire conservative establishment is responsible for creating the environment in which a candidate such as Trump can even exist.
Elected officials. Talk-radio. Conservative pundits. Fox News. They're all guilty. They failed to stomp out the fire while it was small and isolated because it was more convenient to let it fester and grow. That fire has now morphed into a blazing inferno that will more than likely leave the Republican Party with a birther as their presidential nominee.
Nearly every candidate currently running or considering running for the Republican nomination has at some point in the recent past closely associated with birthers, declared themselves to be birther, or dished out winks and nods when confronted by the issue. Donald Trump is simply doing the best job at exploiting the emotions that were already present among Republican voters.
I applaud Lawrence O'Donnell's dedication to exposing Trump as an emotionally-exploitative fraudster, but I believe he is missing the larger point. The entire Republican Party is guilty-as-charged, and while the establishment scolds Trump as being a "joke," behind the scenes they're really just angry because he stole their mojo, not because they disagree with him.