No birth certificate? Is 'Donald Trump' a real person?

It turns out that what newly converted 'birther' Donald Trump released with much fanfare is not an official birth certificate. What does that say about his identity, and possible presidential bid?

Developer/reality show star Donald Trump yesterday released his birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States. Except it wasn’t his birth certificate – it was a birth document from a Queens hospital that is less than official, apparently.

Oops. Is now a good time to ask how that possible presidential race is shaping up, Mr. Trump?

Anyway, this whole thing is an issue (or an issuelette, maybe, since we’re not exactly talking Libya) only because Trump has been raising questions about whether President Obama was born in the US.

On Monday Trump said on Fox News that he is “really concerned” about Obama’s citizenship status. It is “inconceivable”, he said, that after all this time Obama hasn’t released his birth certificate.

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Perhaps it is inconceivable because the Obama campaign released his certificate of live birth in 2008, as well as birth announcements printed in Hawaii newspapers. But Trump – and the “birther” movement as a whole – appear to simply wave this evidence away.

Trump’s release of his own, well, whatever it is seemed an attempt to prove something, though we’re not sure what. Is it possible that Trump himself wasn’t born in the US? That’s what some pundits are pretending to think, because all the news has been serious lately and they’re looking for something to cheer themselves up.

“Trump’s mother, it should be noted, was born in Scotland, which is not part of the United States. His plane is registered in the Bahamas, also a foreign country. This fact pattern – along with a wave of new questions surrounding what he claims is a birth certificate – raises serious doubts about his eligibility to serve as President of the United States,” wrote Ben Smith in Politico.

We salute Mr. Smith, and go him one better. Is it possible that Trump cannot produce a valid birth certificate because he does not exist?

Have you ever met Trump? No, you haven’t. You’ve seen him as an assemblage of glowing pixels on a screen. That proves nothing. Homer Simpson is made up of pixels too. This indicates that Trump may be an animation –an animation drawn by artists in a foreign country, we might add.

Trump could disprove this by jetting around the country and introducing himself to every US voter in person. Though even then, “Donald Trump” could be a clever performance artist inhabiting a role, like Stephen Colbert. (Which would be cool – admit it.)

Enough of this donaldfoolery already. We know Trump is a real person. Trump’s lawyer and advisor Michael Cohen, reached in Italy on vacation by CBS News, noted the fairly obvious fact that nobody is going to question whether Donald Trump was born in New York City.

What other metropolis could have bred somebody like him? Minneapolis/St. Paul?

“If he is asked to produce a raised seal New York City Department of Health birth certificate, I’m pretty sure he can have one in as quick a period of time as you can go down and get it,” Cohen told CBS.

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