During President Obama's first term, Trump became the most high-profile adherent of the baseless "birther" conspiracy, which questioned the president's Hawaiian birth and suggested that he may have been secretly born in Kenya.

Five years ago, Barack Obama responded to Trump's public incredulity by releasing his long-form birth certificate just in time for that year's White House Correspondent's Dinner, where the President mercilessly mocked Trump's paranoia. It was later revealed that the operation to take down Osama bin Laden had been getting underway as the president was publicly ridiculing Trump.

Even after the release of the president's long-form birth certificate, Trump continued to pedal the same conspiracy theory, telling reporters that a credible source had told him that the birth certificate was a fraud.

But last year, with his own presidential campaign underway, Trump shifted his rhetoric, telling Late Show host Stephen Colbert, “I don’t talk about that anymore.”

In the past Trump has also endorsed a legal theory that says natural-born U.S. citizens who are either born outside the territorial United States or who are not born to natural-born American citizens are ineligible for the presidency. Trump used this theory to attack his Canadian-born opponent Ted Cruz despite the fact that most legal scholars reject that particular reading of the Constitution.

That same dubious legal theory would have left Trump ineligible for the presidency because of his Scottish-born mother was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, a fact Trump never addressed while on the campaign trail.