Trump promotes 'totally baseless' birther conspiracy theory against Nikki Haley

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Trump promotes 'totally baseless' birther conspiracy theory against Nikki Haley
nbcnews.com

Donald Trump, the chief propagator of false “birther” claims first against then-President Barack Obama and later against Sen. Ted Cruz, has a new target: Nikki Haley.

As Haley surges in New Hampshire polling, Trump posted an article on his Truth Social account from a right-wing outlet that claimed Haley, his GOP rival, is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.

Haley was born in South Carolina and has lived in the U.S. her entire life. Her parents were immigrants, who became citizens after her birth in 1972.

“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote in an email. “I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”

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the guys playbook is not very thick. and hes an lying idiot.

par for this course.

i dont understand how every media outlet that exists isnt broadcasting the words 'trump lying again' instead of this obfuscation they like to achieve that hides his misdeeds from the ignorant.

Honestly this is great though. The GOP should be bombarded with this fact for the entire primary, make sure Haley supporters never want to hold their nose in the general.

As much as it irritates the contrarian in me, I do have to chalk this up to an honest criticism of capitalism in general. Since news corps have to pander to both advertisers and broad swaths of the public, who are often on the squeamish side when it comes to facts they themselves find unpleasant, big news corps are extremely limited in how they can present things.

Generally viewer-funded news gets around this, in the US that's things like PBS, NPR, Democracy Now and nowadays, Patreon supported content creators. Not that this system is without flaws or anything, but it's significantly better in general.

But look at it this way: They're selling a product, in an environment swarming with competition, and their costs are very high. So they're going to lean into the biggest markets they can. The kind that eat too much McDonalds and watch reality tv and don't vote. Naturally, those folks don't like their analysis to be too hard-hitting, otherwise it'd be routinely, roundaboutly implying they're fat, stupid and lazy. Saying that to your customers is rather counterproductive, no matter how true it is.

I'd be reluctant to speak so openly about it myself, except there's not really many of them on here. They're mostly all on facebook, twitter and reddit still. Y'know, the lazy options.

His playbook is scrawled in crayon on the back of an Applebee's kids menu. It just reads "whenever I do something bad, make up a story about the other side doing it"

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I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t blame Haley for fucking around with trump in the first place.

Remember the demented orange rule: Everyone who works with trump gets shit on. No Exceptions

Yeah, on one hand I feel bad blaming the brown lady for her facing racism, but on the other hand we all hate the racist guy as much as we can and like no fucking shit this was going to happen. It’s not that he genuinely believed that Obama was from Kenya, it’s that a black guy pissed him off and so he fucking lied. Now a desi lady is pissing him off so he’s gonna tell basically the same lie because his supporters fell for it last time. You can’t win with him, only against him

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The irony of this guy wanting to disqualify someone from running for president based on the constitution.

Somebody is getting nervous about those poll numbers in NH, huh.

His anxiety and flailing would bring me happiness if we weren’t on the brink of a disaster.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the only people he targets with this shit aren't white, because I've been repeatedly told by Republicans that he's definitely not a racist.

The dumbest part is that idiots think he's clever.

I’ve been repeatedly told by Republicans that he’s definitely not a racist.

Time for that Sartre quote:

“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [racists] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

“I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”

Must not have a good imagination. What he hopes to gain is to undermine his next closest rival by making people think she's ineligible.

I'm sure he'll be asking for a long form birth certificate soon but I doubt this will work on Haley as she's white passing and she's done a good job mentally to suppress her heritage unless it's convenient for her.

Yes, Donald. We know. Anyone who isn't white wasn't born in the U.S.

I was surprised to discover her ethnicity, just thought she was a 'nother white (yet tan) 'Pub

Given this guy and his following horde's tendency to project, I think it's probable that Trump himself wasn't born in the U.S.A.

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All these republicunts can fuck each other in the ass with a cactus. Fucking traitors, one and all.

Busting out the classics again. It doesn't matter what the truth is, Trump just aims to put the idea in the heads of folks that are open to xenophobic or racist beliefs.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


DES MOINES, Iowa — Donald Trump, the chief propagator of false “birther” claims first against then-President Barack Obama and later against Sen. Ted Cruz, has a new target: Nikki Haley.

“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote in an email.

“I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”

“Someone should tell him [Trump] that the North won” the Civil War, joked Burt Neuborne, a professor emeritus at New York University Law School and the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MSNBC columnist, called Trump’s suggestion that Haley is ineligible “offensive” but also noted that it could be an issue that eventually makes its way to the courts more fully.

But nonetheless, the question of the term ‘natural born citizen’ has not been fully fleshed out in the courts, and it may be that Trump is relegating us to more meaningless discourse in this area just like he did with the birther lies about Obama.”


The original article contains 735 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

As long as there are headlines with his name in big letters, he's got what he wants. And the MSM just. keeps. on. falling for it.

They aren't falling for anything, the rage clicking is making them rich.

Yeah. There's that.

But no one's getting rich off posting those stories on Lemmy, or upvoting them in such large numbers. He's like a train-wreck that we can't look away from.

Time to implement a keyword filter for PieFed, I guess.

Well when you click the story, ad money appears in the bank account of the news site--that's my real point.

This guy has zero shame. What an asshat.