HAS HE NO SHAME?

I didn’t want to write about Donald Trump anymore, but he is making me do it.

Today, President Obama published on the White House website a long-form version of his birth certificate. This “certificate” is a longer, more complete document than the “certification” that his campaign released in 2008, which is what a citizen of Hawaii typically receives when he requests documents of birth. The publication of this document should stop all discussions of Obama’s citizenship once and for all.

Moments after the president released the document, Trump took credit for its release. Saying that he was “very proud of being able to accomplish something no one else was able to accomplish”, Trump said, “I’m taking great credit and you have to ask the president, ‘why didn’t he do this a long time ago? Why didn’t he do it a long time ago?’ When Hillary Clinton was asking, when everybody was asking, why didn’t he do it? It’s shocking. It’s shocking.”

Now, just for the record, on April 15th, in this blog, I said “[Trump] will retract this birther nonsense, Basically, he won’t want to be scraping this shit off the bottom of his shoe for the rest of his life, so he will claim to have made an open-minded investigation of the birther claims, and will proudly put his imprimatur on Obama’s citizenship. He will move from skeptic to validator.” I think that was pretty close.

Now Trump has upped the ante, and has begun to question Obama’s qualifications for being admitted to Columbia University. “I heard he was a terrible student,” he said, in part, rolling the point back and forth. “How does a bad student get into Columbia University and then Harvard Law?” He is now demanding that Obama release his transcripts.

The insinuation is clear: Obama was undeservedly admitted into Columbia because he is black. Trump may deny that this is his implication, but he cannot run from it.

Trump has had a glorious spring, proving to NBC that he is a world-caliber publicity machine who can manipulate the world’s media merely by whispering the word “candidacy.” On that basis, he has increased the viewership and rating for his cheesy TV show, and more deeply ingratiated himself into NBC’s plans. No doubt he has also increased the value of his name, which, by attaching it to condos and golf courses, is the source of much of his wealth. But Trump is now one small step away from destroying all that. Whether Obama had poor grades before he was admitted into Columbia or not is entirely immaterial; he has proven his legitimacy, indeed, to the point that his success now would legitimate whatever affirmative action program nurtured him. We are not talking about an academic underachiever who got a sheepskin from Basketball State on the strength of his jump shot. We are talking about a man who got himself elected president of the United States.

This is a thinly disguised shout of “Nigger;” perhaps not even disguised at all.

We are one short step away from the moment when America recoils in disgust from these despicable tactics.

We await only the moment when Joseph Welch turns to Senator McCarthy and says “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”