Donald Trump is not sorry for spending five years denying the legitimacy of America’s first black president, he said during Monday night’s presidential debate. 

Trump cut off debate moderator Lester Holt as Holt seemed to be asking what Trump had to say to people of color about his many years of denying that President Barack Obama had been born in the United States.

“I say nothing. I say nothing because I was able to get him to produce it,” Trump said of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, which the White House released in 2011. 

“I think that I developed very, very good relationships over the last little while with the African American community,” Trump said. “I think you can see that.”

Polls indicate very low support for Trump among African Americans, 72 percent of whom said in a recent Huffington Post /YouGov survey that Trump should apologize for his “birther” crusade. 

Trump also tried to blame Clinton for starting birtherism during the 2008 Democratic primary, a phony talking point he unveiled last week when he said for the first time that he believed Obama was born in the U.S.

“They were pressing it very hard. She failed to get the birth certificate,” Trump said Monday. “When I got involved, I didn’t fail. I got him to give the birth certificate. So I’m satisfied with it.”

Trump has been America’s top birther since he started questioning Obama’s birthplace in 2011, even claiming that he would send a team to Hawaii to investigate “one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond.”

The basic theory, for which Trump and other birthers have never produced a shred of credible evidence, is that contemporaneous documents proving Obama’s Hawaiian birth in 1961 were conspiratorially planted so he could run for president nearly a half-century later. 

When the White House released the long-form certificate in 2011, Trump declared that he was proud of himself. But he has continued fanning the birther flames, right up until he decided he could try to say it had been Clinton behind birtherism all long. 

While one official with Clinton’s 2008 campaign drafted a memo with talking points about Obama’s supposed lack of American roots, the campaign didn’t push skepticism of Obama’s Hawaiian birthplace. Some of her supporters circulated a birther email and speculated about Obama’s birth certificate on obscure blogs.

“It can’t be dismissed that easily,” Clinton said at Monday’s debate. “He has really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen.”