It’s easy to forget, amidst his unlikely rise to the Republican presidential nomination, that Donald Trump came very close to running for president four years ago on a platform of “show me the birth certificate.” His former campaign manager and current CNN contributor Corey Lewandowski appeared on the network Tuesday night to remind voters of Trump’s conspiratorial beginnings.
Lewandowski criticized President Obama for answering questions about the election during a White House press briefing before fellow panelist Angela Rye interjected.
“Donald Trump has been attacking the president long before he began campaigning for this important office,” she pointed out. “He is the one who was the spokesman of the birther movement and was calling for transcripts and saying that the president was an affirmative action admittee of Harvard.”
The mere mention of college transcripts triggered a cascading series of retorts from Lewandowski, who momentarily lapsed into the very same birtherism that turned his former boss into a literal laughingstock five years ago. Before the segment could fall too far off the rails though, Rye channelled her inner Beyonce and tried to shut the whole thing down.
“Corey, in this moment I’m going to Beyonce you: boy, bye. You’re so out of line right now,” she said.
She ain’t sorry, either. Host Don Lemon pushed Lewandowski to explain why President Obama’s college transcripts were germane to the 2016 election, but he was less interested in answering that and more interested in once again raising the specter of Obama’s foreign citizenship.
“I just simply said, have [the transcripts] ever been released? And the question was, did he get in as a U.S. citizen, or was he brought into Harvard University as a citizen who wasn’t from this country? I don’t know the answer.”
He does know the answer, because President Obama’s birth certificate was very publicly released more than five years ago. Suggesting that there are still unanswered questions about Obama’s citizenship is a not-too-subtle invitation to the xenophobic, bigoted corners of the population who are still willing to believe anything about a black president with a Muslim-sounding name.
Questioning President Obama’s academic credentials has been a favorite trope of racists who find it hard to stomach the idea that a black man could have the requisite grades to attend an elite institution like Harvard Law, and instead must have taken the spot of a better qualified white man thanks to affirmative action. Obama would go on to become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review and a renowned constitutional law professor before running for public office.