The NYT actually used the word "lie" in an article about Trump! Was this the one that will finally get the press to stop treating Trump like a fun-time novelty ?

The essential question — why promote a lie? — may be unanswerable. Was it sport? Was it his lifelong quest to court media attention? Was it racism? Was it the cynical start of his eventual campaign for president?

It might not matter. He kept doing it. And then on Friday, he stopped, with a bizarre new deception, congratulating himself for putting to rest the doubts about Mr. Obama that he had fanned since 2011. “I finished it,’’ he declared. “President Obama was born in the United States — period.’’

Surrounded by, and in many ways shielded by, decorated veterans in his new Washington, D.C., hotel, he could not resist indulging in another falsehood — that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had started the so-called birther movement. She did not.

Much has been made of Mr. Trump’s casual elasticity with the truth; he has exhausted an army of fact-checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications. But this lie was different from the start, an insidious, calculated calumny that sought to undo the embrace of an African-American president by the 69 million voters who elected him in 2008.

I doubt it.