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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday said he believes President Barack Obama was born in the United States. The statement followed a chaotic 24 hours during which Trumps campaign spokesman said the nominee believed Obama was a natural born citizen, but Trump himself refused to answer the question.

President Obama was born in the United States, period, Trump said on Friday. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.

Trumps announcement was an abridged version of the one put out by his campaign spokesman late Thursday, which falsely claimed that Trumps Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, started the birther conspiracies.

Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it, Trump said.

Trumps statement, and that of his campaign, hope to put distance between Trump and the racist conspiracy theory that hes fanned for nearly a decade.

His campaign said Thursday that it was Trump who was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate.

Trump on Friday said, I finished it, you know what I mean.

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Trumps claim about Clintons role in the conspiracy theory is patently false, and has been debunked over and over . Still, that didnt stop Trump from repeating it on Friday. Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy, Trump said. I finished it.

Trump spoke at his new hotel in Washington D.C. from the Presidential Ballroom, a large room with a fair amount of gold trimming and chandeliers. A number of veterans stood behind him, as the event was officially meant to be focused on veterans issues.

Attendees were hesitant to discuss the issue of Obamas birth ahead of the candidates speech. One woman from Maryland told The Huffington Post that it didnt matter anymore because [Obama] is so close to leaving office anyway.

Others were willing to concede that Obama was born in Hawaii. But they blamed the president, not Trump, for making it an issue.

This could have been eliminated from the get go if Barack Obama just put out his birth certificate, said Sergio de la Pena, a Trump surrogate. He waited until 2011. Why didnt he just put this to bed?

Pena called the current obsession on the birther issue, pole vaulting over rat turds.

But the high degree of national interest in the birther conspiracy can be attributed largely to Trump, who has energetically fueled the false conspiracy theory that Obama was born overseas since 2011.

Not surprisingly, Trump refuses to acknowledge what the birther conspiracy theories really are: racist ploys intended to delegitimize the nations first black president, but failed to do so.

Yet even as Trump sought to put the issue to rest in Washington, his longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone told a Boston radio station Friday morning that Trump has always had suspicions about [Obamas birthplace], and to him it has never added up.

I think the bottom line is he doesnt know [and] hes not sure, Stone said of the Republican nominee. Thats not the same as Im certain the president was born in Hawaii or Im certain that he was not.

Uncertainty, however, is at the heart of conspiracy theories, and its precisely what Trump spread for years, long after Obama released a long-form copy of his birth certificate in 2011.

As the grandaddy of the so-called birther conspiracy, Trump has repeatedly claimed, falsely, that Obamas birth certificate is fake, that the president was actually born in Kenya, and even that a state health director in Hawaii was the victim of foul play in an attempted cover up.

An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama 's birth certificate is a fraud.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012

Via @BreitbartFeed --why doesn't @BarackObama release his original book proposal which says he was born in Kenya?http://t.co/pDDHJcjH
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2012

How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obamas birth certificate died in plane crash today. All others lived
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2013

Editors note: Donald Trump regularlyincitespolitical violence and is a

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