Tea Party at Trump’s

Monday, April 25, 2011 | 2:05 a.m.

As he toys with a run for president, Donald Trump is doing what he does best — get attention. He has garnered a stream of headlines as he has made a very public show of challenging President Barack Obama.

Republicans find him to be appealing, according to early polls. He has finished in the top three in several surveys. Of course, Trump has an advantage because he is widely known across the country. With his larger-than-life persona, the developer was making headlines long before his popular reality TV show began.

Trump has been a fascination. Although he’s rich, he carries himself as a populist who often says outrageous things without a second thought. At a recent Tea Party rally in Florida, he commented on:

• Japan’s disaster: “For 30 years they’ve been ripping us off and taking advantage of us. But I still think we should help. See, don’t I have a great heart?”

• Obama: He will “most certainly go down as the worst president in the history of the United States.”

• Himself: “I’ve come out almost always as the victor, and I have to say that. Because, you know, I don’t want to be braggadocious, but that’s the kind of a person” the country needs as president.

The speech earned the applause of the assembled Tea Party activists in Florida and elsewhere, but his effort to court conservatives hasn’t stopped there. He has chased after the conspiracy theories of the right wing’s fringe, reviving “issues” that have long since been proven false. Trump has questioned whether the president was born in the United States and said he sent investigators to Hawaii to look into it. He claimed Obama “came out of nowhere,” adding that people who went to school with Obama never saw or knew him. And in an interview on Fox News, Trump took it one step further, telling an incredulous Bill O’Reilly that Obama might be hiding his birth certificate, speculating that it could say he’s Muslim.

As we have noted before, those are ludicrous claims. The issue of the president’s birth in Hawaii has been well documented and includes birth announcements from the time in two newspapers. Plenty of people remember Obama’s youth in Hawaii and his college years on the mainland. And the president’s religious beliefs have been well-known. He has never claimed to be a Muslim, but has held to a Christian faith and was a member of a church in Chicago for years.

So what is Trump doing? He can’t seriously believe all that, can he?

Some political observers have suggested that Trump is craftily using a potential run for president as a publicity stunt for his TV show. He has said that he might make some sort of announcement on the show’s season finale in May — that could help ratings. But Trump’s insistence to deplorably dwell on falsehoods could damage his credibility. That may not matter to Trump, given his remarkable resiliency to bankruptcies and bad news, but he may soon find himself marginalized.

So why are Republicans enamored with him? They can’t really believe all that nonsense, can they?