If Donald Trump's goal is to differentiate himself from those jelly-kneed Republican candidates too timid to ask even the most basic questions about President Barack Obama's origins, he is doing a bang-up job of it.
Wednesday morning on The View, Trump refused to buckle under the hectoring protests of the View panelists and even Whoopi Goldberg's shameless race baiting. "I want [Obama] to show his birth certificate!" said Trump defiantly, adding with a knowing edge, "There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like."
Here, Trump made precisely the right point. It is not that Obama was born in Kenya, but rather that there may very well be something on that certificate that does not square with the official Obama origins story, the one on which Obama based his political ascendancy.
In researching my book Deconstructing Obama, I found much that did match the accepted nativity story, most dramatically the fact that the storied Obama family never lived together. Indeed, there never was an Obama family save in the pages of Obama's often apocryphal memoir, Dreams from My Father.
When asked whether he could defeat Obama in 2012, Trump answered, "I think if I run and win and get the nomination, I definitely think I could beat Obama." If he sticks to his guns, he just might.
