Is Donald Trump willing to go back to being a birther?
Though it cost Trump nothing to indulge the birthers year after year, others paid a price. The martyr of the birther movement was Terry Lakin, an army colonel court-martialed in 2010 and sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to report for duty in Afghanistan. Lakin held that the order was unconstitutional, in that it was authorized by an “illegitimate” president. Lakin told his story in Officer’s Oath, a book subtitled, “Why My Vow to Defend the Constitution Demanded I Sacrifice My Career.”
Curiously, both Lakin and Ciavolino wish the petition had been posted a year or two from now. “I think there’s a lot of more urgent things going on,” Lakin told me by phone from his home in Colorado. But an impetuous supporter of Lakin’s got the ball rolling as soon as Trump was sworn in. Lakin doubts the petition will collect 100,000 signatures. “It doesn’t look good at all,” he said.
I wondered what he thought when Trump let it be known he’d concluded Obama was born in America after all.
