Don Lemon spoke out on his CNN show on Tuesday night to claim that those who thought former President Barack Obama was not actually born in Hawaii have been led to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

“You remember, I’m sure, covering the Barack Obama running, then-Senator Barack Obama running for president,” Lemon began. “He was a Muslim, right? He wasn’t born in this country and so on and so forth. In large part, the Tea Party was started because of Barack Obama. John McCain having to tell people, you know, that he was not a Muslim and all of these things with effigies of President Obama or Senator Obama who became president.”

“I think the makings were all happening with the Republican Party,” he added. “This is a progression. I think it’s been a slow progression in some ways, but Donald Trump certainly accelerated it. I think it was happening even while the former president was still a senator and running for president.”

“This is just a natural progression,” Lemon concluded. “If you believe a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump helped to spread about birtherism, then the national progression is especially if you elect him as president, that you’re going to believe other conspiracy theories that if he tells you the election was stolen when there was no evidence that it was stolen you are going to believe it. It’s a natural progression.”

This came one day after Obama claimed that Republicans “cowed” to Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election by passing new voting laws.

“I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,” Obama said.

“The degree to which we did not see that Republican establishment say hold on, time out, that’s not acceptable,” he later added. “That’s not who we are but rather be cowed into accepting and then finally culminating on January 6 where what originally was ‘Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t going in where. We’re just letting Trump and others vent.’”

“Then suddenly you now have large portions of an elected Congress going along with the falsehood,” Obama concluded. “I didn’t expect that there would be so few people who say well, well I don’t mind losing my office because this is too important. America is too important.”