Monkey Business

All right, let me see if I have this straight…

One night on The Tonight Show, Bill Maher suggested that Donald Trump was born of the union between Trump's mother and a male orangutan. Then he added, "I'm not saying it's true. I hope it's not true. But unless he comes up with proof, I'm willing to offer $5 million to Donald Trump that he can donate to a charity of his choice." Trump then sent a copy of his birth certificate to Maher and is now suing him for the five million.

This is the same Donald Trump who does not accept Barack Obama's birth certificate as proof of anything.

Now, I'm guessing this'll never see the inside of a courtroom…and if it does, a judge will toss it as frivolous. But I assume Maher's next move will be to milk this for all the attention it's worth and to declare that Trump's birth certificate is an obvious forgery…maybe bring on "experts" to assert that. This will put Mr. Trump in the ludicrous position of asserting that his unqualified experts are right about the Obama birth certificate and Maher's unqualified experts are wrong about the Trump birth certificate.

I believe Trump has also insisted that he's never said for sure that Obama wasn't born here; just that he's asking questions. And of course, Maher never said he was sure that Trump was fathered by an orangutan. He's just asking questions.

Maher might also point out that Trump's "proof" that his biological father was not an orangutan isn't proof at all. When they put your name down on a birth certificate as father, they don't do DNA testing. If the mother and alleged father assert that's the father, that's the name that is listed.

So what is it with Trump? Is it that he doesn't mind people thinking he's a clown just as long as the checks clear and they're spelling his name right on buildings? He seems to do one of these a year, often around the time his Celebrity Apprentice needs attention. Last year, Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC called it to the day in predicting when Trump would withdraw his alleged candidacy for the presidency. If Trump does have any political aspirations, he probably shouldn't be denying Maher's allegation. The orangutan vote may be the only one he can get.