As he pursues his egomaniacal quest for attention and comb-over-exposure, Donald Trump is conclusively demonstrating that you can be a billionaire and an idiot at the same time. Like Henry Ford, who revolutionized manufacturing while supporting Hitler, Trump might be able to get an office building erected, but he can’t think past a third grade level on politics or social affairs.

It was recently revealed that Trump’s Birther obsession has been fueled by the wackiest wingnut publisher on the Internet, WorldNetDaily. WND’s editor-in-chief, Joseph Farah, says that he talks with The Donald “quite a bit.” That’s painfully obvious in that Trump has now adopted one of the most ludicrous, and easily debunked, schizoid rumors that WND has been promoting for years.

WND’s conspiracy nutjob, Jack Cashill, has been asserting for almost three years that Barack Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father,” was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. He concluded this by conducting a hare-brained study on the style of language used in the book. Unfortunately, even researchers he contacted would not endorse this nonsense.

Nevertheless, Trump paid a visit to the Hannity program on Fox News and announced that he believes the Cashill ghostwriting fable:

Trump: I heard he [Obama] had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person.
Hannity: You suspect Bill Ayers?
Trump: I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book. […] He was best friends with Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers was a super-genius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well recently, as you know last week, Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the book.

Where to begin? There is so much about this that is just plain moronic. Let’s begin with the fact that Trump has no idea what Obama’s grades were, and he even admits it by saying it was something he “heard” (voices in his head?). The truth is that Obama earned an academic scholarship to Harvard and, while there, proved his worthiness by becoming the editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduating with honors.

Next, Trump’s assertion that Obama and Ayers were “best friends” is contrary to every factual account of their relationship which has always been at most an acquaintanceship.

Then Trump says that Ayers admitted to writing the book. Can Trump really be this monumentally stupid? He is referring to a speech Ayers gave wherein he was obviously mocking claims in the conservative press that he was the author. Ayers joked that it was true and therefore he wanted his share of the royalties. The audience got it and laughed appropriately. Trump is just regurgitating the take that WND had at the time.

So with no evidence whatsoever, Trump jumped aboard another runaway conspiracy train engineered by WorldNetDaily. He is embracing delusions that some of the most insane stalwarts of the right have rejected. For a supposedly serious GOP candidate to align himself with the crackpottery of WND says a lot about how seriously we can take today’s Republican Party.

Even Glenn Beck has gotten sick of the Birther craze saying “Stop With The Damn Birth Certificate!” [Note: As is typical with Beck’s proclivity for hypocrisy, last night he told an audience in Albany that “I don’t know where [Obama is from] I don’t think he’s from where they issue birth certificates – I think he’s from Hell.” So Beck has gone even further by asserting that Obama is from a place even worse than Kenya].

Perhaps the mind-numbingly idiotic moment of the Hannity interview was when Trump said this:

“Look, he was born ‘Barry Soetero.’ Somewhere along the line, he changed his name.”

Not exactly, Donald. Obama was the son of, and namesake to, Barack Obama Sr. His step-father Lolo Soetoro married Obama’s mother when Obama was four years old. Is Trump’s derangement so severe that he has completely lost his grasp of reality?

Some recent polls have shown Trump rising in popularity. It should be noted that these are polls of Republican primary voters, not the general public. This shows how frighteningly extremist the GOP base has become. They just adore paranoid conspiracies and mutilated facts. And they are oblivious to coherent arguments and objective truths. They happily ignore the fact that Trump once supported universal health care and was an advocate of gay rights. And imagine the rash of head explosions if the Tea Party crowd ever got wind of this quote from Trump’s book:

“I would impose a one-time, 14.25% tax on individuals and trusts with a net worth over $10 million. For individuals, net worth would be calculated minus the value of their principal residence. That would raise $5.7 trillion in new revenue, which we would use to pay off the entire national debt. […] Some will say that my plan is unfair to the extremely wealthy. I say it is only reasonable to shift the burden to those most able to pay. The wealthy actually would not suffer severe repercussions.”

Needless to say, Trump disavows these positions today in favor of Tea Party propaganda. He now believes that we should appropriate billions of dollars from other countries to pay down our debt (he doesn’t say how). He believes we should just take the oil from Libya and Iraq. And he favors military action against Iran and North Korea. And the Tea Party Republicans just love this guy.

Me too. I am now completely behind the Trump candidacy for the GOP nomination. I don’t think there could be any better nominee – for the Democrats. While Palin, Huckabee, or Gingrich, would lose to Obama by historic margins, Trump would not only lose, but he would so embarrass anyone from admitting an affinity for the Republican Party that it would ensure a Democratic majority for a couple of generations. So…..

Go Trump/Bachmann 2012!