CLARENCE PAGE: Is Trump bringing birtherism back?

Oh, no, he didn’t.

But, oh, yes, he … did!

President Donald Trump, who took the lead of a bonkers “birther” conspiracy movement against Barack Obama, wasted little time before greeting Democratic front-runner Joe Biden’s newly announced running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, with a new version of the same bogus smear.

Responding to a question from reporters, Trump dubiously cited a “highly qualified, very talented lawyer” Thursday in saying that he didn’t know whether Harris was qualified to serve as vice president or not. Trump was referring to a Newsweek opinion piece by Chapman University law professor John Eastman that takes giant leaps of logic to question Harris’ eligibility, despite her having been born in California, which qualifies her for the job.

The theory is easily shot down in a rebuttal essay by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh. But as we saw with the Obama birther myth, conspiracy theories take on a life of their own when a candidate such as Trump needs to build a movement.

“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said. “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that out.”

Of course they did. As the Oakland-born daughter of a Jamaican immigrant father and an Indian immigrant mother, she’s legally eligible to run. Case closed.

But Trump and his campaign are desperate. Polls show him slipping further behind Biden. This has left Trump’s campaign with a tough dilemma as it tries to obey what some strategists call the first rule of campaigning: Redefine your opponent before your opponent can redefine you.

That was easier for Trump to do as a political outsider challenging the great insider, Hillary Clinton.

Biden, a well-known figure in national politics for decades, has proved to be resilient and so, it appears, has Harris. As a woman of color whose center-left positions have been praised and criticized by both sides, she makes an appropriate running mate for Biden.

The Biden-Harris team, meanwhile, presents a welcome picture to Democrats and independents of unity and, ah, yes, hope and change to those who have been feeling a little too much Trump fatigue.

Still, efforts to redefine Harris jumped quickly into the silly. In the punditocracy, even the usually sensible Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to George W. Bush, disparaged Harris on Fox News as “just not that historically exciting to African Americans. She certainly wasn’t during the primary.”

Well, as an actual Black American, I beg to differ.

A July poll from the African American Research Collaborative similarly found that strong majorities of Black voters would be more likely to encourage friends and family to vote for Biden if he picked a Black or African American woman.

And she is hardly a stranger to the Black American experience. I remind — or, in some cases, inform — questioners that she grew up as a child of color bused in a Berkeley public schools desegregation program and graduated from Howard University, one of the nation’s most respected historically Black colleges.

But you won’t hear much about that from Trump, who has called her a range of nicknames and adjectives, including “mean,” “nasty,” “ambitious,” “horrible,” “radical” and other ugly labels that often have been applied to him.

Now Trump appears to be unifying Democrats just as Hillary Clinton unified Republicans four years ago. The least he could do is to make up some new epithets.

Email Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.