Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will speak from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. this morning.
Trump will begin speaking at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time. The event can be viewed in the embedded YouTube player via Right Side Broadcasting.
During this event, Trump is expected to address whether he believes that President Obama was born in the United States. On Thursday night, the Trump campaign released a statement saying that Trump now accepts that Obama was in fact born in Hawaii, even though he has repeatedly alleged over the past several years that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake.
“In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate,” the statement reads. “Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised.”
This last line is referring to the fact that the question of Obama’s birthplace originated with some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 Democratic primaries, but these questions never came from the Clinton campaign itself.
Thursday’s statement was written by Communications Advisor Jason Miller, not Trump himself. And in an interview published just hours earlier in The Washington Post, the candidate once again refused to say that Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
Members of Trump’s camp, including Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani, have said that Trump now personally thinks Obama is a U.S. citizen, but Trump has never said this himself, and he questioned whether the president’s birth certificate is legitimate as early as this year. According to Fox Business, Trump says he will have a “big statement” today regarding birtherism, and it is believed that this will come during the Washington, D.C. event this morning.