Hey y'all, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with an early edition of Monday Mail. Friday Mail has not so good a ring to it, but fine.

We're gonna spend time answering your questions about the issues, what we see on the campaign trail, and anything else you are curious about.

I, with the slight head cold, am Sam Sanders, campaign reporter.

Susan Davis, I cover Congress, and I'm Dominican Montenegro, political editor.

So we're gonna get to your questions ASAP, but before we start, really quick, we have to discuss what Donald Trump said today, this morning, at an event in DC at his newly opened Trump hotel.

He said this.

President Barack Obama was born in the United States period.

Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.

So this was a thing in the news this week because he was facing new questions about whether or not he actually believes Obama was born here in the US.

Trump's campaign issued a statement this week saying he does believe it and today he finally said it, but got a point out, the one thing he also said was that Hillary Clinton began this thing.

Hillary Clinton.

And her campaign of 2008 started the Bertha controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean.

That's not true. She has never herself taken part in any claims that Obama was not born here. What do we make of this and what he said today?

Well, I mean, this is something that's haunted Donald Trump for a few years and but it's also part of a strong constituency of his supporters who do believe this.

It's not true. Obviously we've talked many times that President Obama was born in Hawaii. Donald Trump finally did talk about it this morning, but tried to draw this false equivalence between Hillary Clinton's campaign and him leading the charge on the Bertha movement.

I mean, Hillary Clinton did not say that Obama was not born in the United States. There was a memo that one of our chief strategists had sent out trying to win over super delegates, other ring Barack Obama, talking about his time growing up in Indonesia.

It had been something that some fringe supporters had talked about on blogs in 2008, but Hillary Clinton had always disavowed, had never brought this up.

And that cannot be compared to how Donald Trump championed this cause over several years.

I agree with anything. Domenico said, I mean, Donald Trump was the most preeminent Bertha in the country. He was the most prominent.

He pushed this theory more than any figure in the Republican Party. And the question now is, what are we about six weeks from election day?

Does it really change the way people perceive him? As Domenico said, there are still a significant number of people in this country who do question where Barack Obama was born in part because people like Donald Trump fed and fueled the theology of Berthaism.

There is also an overlap here in terms of how alienating Berthaism has been to particularly African American voters who believe that Bertha conspiracies are part of sort of a larger effort to delegitimize President Obama

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