text: To the Editor: 
   
   Re “Donald Trump Gets Weirder,” by Gail Collins (column, April 2): 
   
   Even before Gail Collins was with The New York Times, she has written nasty and derogatory articles about me. Actually, I have great respect for Ms. Collins in that she has survived so long with so little talent. Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many best sellers), is not at a very high level. More importantly, her facts are wrong! 
   
   As far as her comments on the so-called “birther” issue, I don't need Ms. Collins's advice. There is a very large segment of our society who believe that Barack Obama, indeed, was not born in the United States. His grandmother from Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth. His family in Honolulu is fighting over which hospital in Hawaii he was born in -- they just don't know. 
   
   He has not been able to produce a “birth certificate” but merely a totally unsigned “certificate of live birth” -- which is totally different and of very little significance. Unlike a birth certificate, a certificate of live birth is very easy to obtain. Equally of importance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hussein Obama was born there -- no bills, no doctors names, no nurses names, no registrations, no payments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in newspapers, many things could have happened, but some feel the grandparents put an ad in order to show that he was a citizen of the U.S. with all of the benefits thereto. Everybody, after all, and especially then, wanted to be a United States citizen. 
   
   The term used by Ms. Collins -- “birther” -- is very derogatory and is meant in a derogatory way. Had this been George Bush or almost any other President or Presidential aspirant, they would never have been allowed to attain office, or would have been thrown out of office very quickly. 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   For some reason, the press protects President Obama beyond anything or anyone I have ever seen. What they don't realize is that if he was not born in the United States, they would have uncovered the greatest "scam" in the history of our country. In other words, they would become the hottest writer since Watergate, or beyond. 
   
   Open your eyes, Gail, there's at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherished Constitution! ||||| “That first book was total genius and helped get him elected,” Trump continued. “But you can tell Obama did the second book himself because it read like it was written by somebody of average intelligence with a high school education.” 
   
   Did I mention that, in his letter, Trump complained about my calling him a “birther” because the word was “very derogatory and meant in a derogatory way”? Obama, of course, graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School — if you can believe Columbia and Harvard Law. 
   
   “Three weeks ago I thought he was born in this country. Right now I have some real doubts. I have people that actually have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” Trump announced on “ Today .” 
   
   Photo 
   
   Trump does not actually seem to have people studying, or even Googling. Still, he sounds very self-assured. This is because before he was a reality-show host, he was in the New York real estate business, a profession in which it is vital to be able to say imaginary things with total certainty. (“I have five other people who are begging me to sell them this property. Begging.”) 
   
   Let’s run over some of his arguments: 
   
   THE GRANDMOTHER STORY “His grandmother in Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth,” Trump wrote. This goes back to a trans-Atlantic telephone call that was made in 2008 by Ron McRae, an Anabaptist bishop and birther, to Sarah Obama, the president’s 86-year-old stepgrandmother. He asked her, through an interpreter, whether she was “present when he was born in Kenya.” The translator responded: “She says, yes, she was. She was present when Obama was born.” 
   
   Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
   
   It is at this point that some of the tapes floating around the Web stop, which means that the listener doesn’t get to hear the follow-up, which makes it very clear that Sarah Obama misunderstood. The full conversation ends with the interpreter saying, for the umpteenth time: “ Hawaii . She says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father, his father was learning there. The state of Hawaii.” 
   
   THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE If only Hawaii made its birth records public, and charged people a thousand dollars a pop to look at them, the state’s budget problems would be solved by the conspiracy theorists. However, it doesn’t. If you were born in Hawaii and request a copy of your birth certificate, you get a certification of live birth, which the federal government accepts for passports. Barack Obama requested his in 2007, and his campaign posted it on the Internet. 
   
   “A certificate of live birth is not even signed by anybody. I saw his. I read it very carefully. It doesn’t have a serial number. It doesn’t have a signature,” said Trump on “Today.” 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   The document has the stamped signature of the state registrar. The University of Pennsylvania ’s FactCheck.org made a pilgrimage to the Obama campaign headquarters, examined the document, felt the seal, checked the serial number and reported that it looked fine. 
   
   THE EMPTY PHOTO ALBUM “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference to great applause. “In fact, I’ll go a step further. The people that went to school with him, they never saw him; they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” 
   
   This week on CNN, Suzanne Malveaux played Trump clips of Hawaiians reminiscing about the schoolchild Obama for a documentary the network had done on the president. 
   
   “Look, I didn’t say that ... If he was 3 years old or 2 years old or 1 year old and people remember him, that’s irrelevant,” Trump responded. “You have to be born in this country.” ||||| Vote for Donald Trump, the man who can make Bill O’Reilly look like the most sensible guy in the room. 
   
   Trump’s main argument for why he should be taken seriously as a presidential contender is his business success. Has Obama ever hosted a long-running reality series? Owned a bankruptcy-bound chain of casinos? Put his name on a flock of really unattractive high-rise apartment buildings? No! 
   
   “By now my name is big enough and equated with the gold standard to the extent that I don’t have to say too much about it,” wrote Trump in one of his books, before going on to say a lot more about it. He is extremely sensitive to any gibes about his business record, which has been up and down over the years. 
   
   Photo 
   
   During one down period, I referred to him in print as a “financially embattled thousandaire” and he sent me a copy of the column with my picture circled and “The Face of a Dog!” written over it. 
   
   Trump was one of the first people I interviewed when I came to New York as a reporter back in the ’80s when he was a developer-wunderkind who had started in the business with nothing but a smile, a dream and his father’s large holdings in real estate. 
   
   He’s still promoting, 24/7. Some people believe that his presidential flirtations are an attempt to draw viewers to his TV show, “Celebrity Apprentice.” In it, people who are alleged to be famous compete for money for their favorite charities and what one former contestant revealed was a salary of $16,000 apiece. That isn’t much for network TV work, but since one of this year’s celebrities, disgraced former steroid -using baseball player Jose Canseco , recently tried to make a $5,000 fee by sending his brother to impersonate him in an exhibition boxing match, you have to figure it comes in handy. 
   
   Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
   
   “Celebrity Apprentice” is widely regarded as terrible and cheesy programming, but, actually, it has its moments. I recently saw an episode in which a former top model had a serious discussion with a fellow competitor about whether this was the 20th century or the 21st. You can’t get stuff like that on “ Mad Men .” 
   
   The series is a perfect reflection of Trump himself: an orgy of product-placement and personal aggrandizement. All the contestants, including the ones in their 70s, have to refer to their host as “Mr. Trump.” They all somberly devote themselves to making faux commercials about whatever enterprise has coughed up cash for a major mention that week. Then it’s off to the boardroom where people talk ceaselessly about their performance in order to stretch the whole enterprise into a low-cost, two-hour show. 
   
   Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
   
   When you think about it, “Celebrity Apprentice” has a lot in common with the current Republican presidential campaign. Endless blathering. Strange contenders who did something vaguely notable in 1986. And Donald Trump, looking extremely cheerful. 
   
   Beyond having the moral fortitude to tell Dionne Warwick she is fired, Trump’s qualifications for being president of the United States include having co-written a large number of books, including “Think Big and Kick Ass” (“People always ask me: ‘How did you get so rich?’ ”) and “ Never Give Up .” (“This book is about a subject near and dear to my heart — never giving up.”) 
   
   To establish his birther creds, this week Trump produced his own birth certificate, after one failed attempt in which he came up with a document that was too weak to qualify for a passport. By the time he worked things out, we had an entire news cycle devoted to Donald Trump having been born in New York.
target: – Last week it was apparent that there's no love lost between Donald Trump and New York Times columnist Gail Collins, but this week it's all-out war. Seems the Donald responded to Collins' column, which tweaked him as a loopy birther, with a letter to the editor tweaking her in turn as a no-good hack for writing "nasty and derogatory articles about me." "Actually," Trump writes, "I have great respect for Ms. Collins in that she has survived so long with so little talent. Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers), is not at a very high level." Snap! This week, Collins slaps back, noting that the bestselling author himself once sent her an "aggrieved message ... in which he misspelled the word 'too.'” Further, she runs down his birther allegations, dismissing his doubts about President Obama's birth certificate, his grandmother, and his authorship of Dreams From My Father as all but absurd. "Recent polls have shown Trump running second among potential Republican primary voters," Collins concludes. "I believe this is not so much an indication of popularity as a desperate plea to be delivered from Mitt Romney."