Trump: ‘I don’t know’ if ‘birther’ attacks hurt image with black voters

Donald Trump was reluctant to say Tuesday night whether he thinks his questioning of President Obama’s birthplace has hurt his image among African-Americans.

“I don’t know, I have no idea,” the Republican presidential nominee said on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”

{mosads}”I guess with maybe some,” Trump conceded, pushing back on the line of questioning.

“I don’t even talk about it anymore, Bill,” Trump said. “Very few [people] – you’re the first one that has brought that up in a while.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, look, I went to Detroit. We had – it was like a love fest,” Trump said.

But the issue came up just one day before, when Trump declined to say Monday whether he believes Obama was born in the U.S. “I don’t talk about it,” he told reporters during a gaggle on his plane.

Ben Carson, an adviser to Trump, told CNN on Tuesday afternoon that it would be “a good idea” for Trump to apologize for questioning Obama’s birthplace.

Trump’s vocal skepticism that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii pressured the White House to ultimately release Obama’s long form birth certificate in 2011.

Some African-Americans, who came out in large numbers to twice elect Obama, viewed the suggestions that he wasn’t born in the U.S. as racist and an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president.

Trump has sought to court African-American voters recently, including giving a speech at a predominantly black church in Detroit over the weekend where he vowed to carry on Abraham Lincoln’s legacy if elected president.

During his Fox News interview, Trump defended his standing among other demographic groups, too.

A CNN poll released Tuesday found his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton leading Trump by a whopping 53 points, 71 percent to 18 percent, among non-white voters.

“I think maybe the 18 [percent] is a lot higher than it was three weeks ago, I think we’ve made a lot of progress,” Trump stated. “I think it’s highly underrated.”

Trump also said he wasn’t sure why his numbers among women were lagging behind Clinton. The CNN poll found Clinton leading Trump 53 to 38 percent among them.

“I think we went way up with married women and we’re going very much higher with women than we were two months ago,” Trump said.

“I really never understood that, why we weren’t doing well, because it’s very much … national security, it’s jobs,” Trump said.