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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. It doesn’t have a signature,” said Trump on “Today.” 
 
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 The document has the stamped signature of the state registrar. More importantly, her facts are wrong! “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. 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.
– 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."