After baiting the entire media into attending the opening of his new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. by promising to finally address the birther controversy swirling around his campaign, Donald Trump used the opportunity to turn the event into a national informercial for his latest real-estate project. He said only a handful of words about President Barack Obama, briefly acknowledging that he was born in the United States, before leaving the stage. Reporters, who were told it would be a press conference, were not allowed to ask any questions.
The Republican presidential nominee, whose vocal advocacy of the racially-tinged birther conspiracy theory launched his political career, then offered to take news cameras for a tour of his new hotel.
Journalists were left fuming. “We just got played. We just got played,” CNN’s John King admitted, shortly after Trump left the lectern, waving to a crowd of military veterans, some of whom had stood on stage to offer their support while the media waited, enraptured, for the candidate to talk. “It’s hard to imagine this as anything other than a political Rick Roll,” Jake Tapper noted, roughly 15 minutes into the spectacle, as several Medal of Honor recipients took the stage to endorse Trump. CNN, and then MSNBC and Fox News, eventually cut away as it dawned on their control rooms that they had been tricked.
Full story: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/donald-trump-birther-obama-press-conference
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