President Donald Trump has no shortage of bizarre conspiracy theories, it seems. At a Thursday rally in Pennsylvania — the birthplace of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who’s from Scranton — Trump suggested to the crowd that Biden wasn’t “born” there at all — which is ridiculous. Trump seemed to be suggesting that Biden can’t claim supposed privileges associated with having a birthplace of Scranton, because he left when he was a kid — but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t “born” there! Trump can’t just change the meaning of words like “born” or wish basic facts out of existence because he feels like it.
Trump ranted:
‘Tonight, Slow Joe will speak at the Democratic Convention, and I’m sure that he’ll just knock ’em dead, and he’ll remind us that he was born in Scranton — but, you know, he left like 70 years ago, right? He left a long time ago. He wasn’t born — I view it differently. He’d say he was born here. But he left when he was like 8, 9 or 10. So he left 68 years ago, he left. Long time ago. So I view it differently. He wasn’t born here. He abandoned Scranton, okay! His family had something to do with that, you know, his parents — but he left Scranton… He abandoned Pennsylvania. He abandoned Scranton.’
Watch his looney comments below:
It wouldn’t matter if Joe Biden hadn’t been in Scranton for 100 years — at no point in the entire history of humanity will the basic fact change that Joe Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Trump can’t just wish that basic fact out of existence. This unhinged gobbledygook is the result of a man who has spent his life obsessed with himself to the point where he feels free to say whatever he wants, even if it makes no sense. His staffers in the White House who enable this behavior with their look-the-other-way political profiteering are complicit.
It’s important to note — although Biden is obviously white, questioning opponents’ birthplaces has a long history as a brazenly racist political tactic employed by the Trump team. Trump targeted Obama with the conspiracy theory that maybe he wasn’t born in the U.S., and more recently, he seemed open to the idea that maybe Democratic vice presidential pick Kamala Harris wasn’t either. Both of them were born in the U.S.
