I’ve been giving some thought to Donald Trump. and his recent embrace of the birther hypothesis. Allow me to state the hypotheses and the evidence in favor of it as best I can in blockquote below:

Barack Obama was born in Kenya. His grandparents took measures during his life to cover up for that fact. The evidence is as follows:

• Barack Obama’s grandmother is on record as saying that she witnessed his birth in Kenya.
• Barack Obama has released a “certificate of live birth” which is an unsigned, unnumbered document, and quite distinct from a certified, signed and numbered birth certificate.
• Barack Obama apparently has a Connecticut social security number. Barack Obama has never lived in the state of Connecticut.
• No witnesses or hospital records can be found regarding his “Hawaiian” birth.
• Barack Obama has apparently spent $2 million fighting inquiries into his birth records.

Trump probably has the deepest or second deepest pockets of all the potential Republican candidates running next winter. And he certainly appears to be the only candidate who is seriously interested in this issue. I suspect that the only way to resolve the issue with any degree of certainty is to produce flight records showing that his mother was overseas during the time of Obama’s birth. And it is not outside of Donald Trump’s means to find such records, should they exist.

What I wonder is, would Trump really want to discover that Obama is not a natural born American. Suppose it were proven that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President of the United States. What would happen? I suppose most people figure that Biden would assume the presidency and that would be that.

Ahh, but not so fast. Obama would never have had a legitimate place on the ballot. So arguably, Biden was not legitimately elected either. That could mean McCain is President, since his ticket was legitimately on the ballot. Or it may mean that the election gets turned back to the house to decide, and they may elect the third in line to the presidency, John Boehner. Were John Boehner the president, then the Republicans presumably would nominate him next year and he would be the candidate in 2012, not Donald Trump. Moreover, Obama’s two supreme court nominations would be invalidated, as would TARP, Obamacare and Frank Dodd. Come to think of it, I rather like how this scenario is playing out.

Maybe Trump should forget running and just put his efforts into finding those flight records of Anne Dunham.

Tags: Barack Obama, Birther, Crackpot Theories, Donald Trump

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2011 at 4:01 pm and is filed under News & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.