Donald Trump says Mitt should release his tax returns, except flapjack

(ThinkProgress) Old man Trump (catchphrases: I'm rich; you're fired; get off my gold-plated lawn) has been peddling this one for quite a while now, but now Fox News is having him on the teevee in order to say it, and favorite GOP talking-point mule Matt Drudge is going with it, so apparently they think it's an actual argument. Regarding Mitt Romney's insistence that nobody is permitted to know the details of how a fabulously wealthy man made his money, Trump says:

They'll take anything that he puts out ' and they're complicated and large because, unlike other people, he did a lot ' and they make him look bad. But I would say this, I would put them out. But we want to see your college applications and your college records because we want transparency also. And I think somebody ought to bring it up. You will see things that you're not going to believe.

Well heck, even Donald Trump is on board with the idea that Mitt needs to release his damn tax returns already, so that's something. But because Donald Trump is so bored with his life that he's taken up collecting nutty Barack Obama conspiracy theories, he wants to pair it with the notion that he can only do this if Barack Obama releases his sinister, sinister, college transcripts. Because in those transcripts are things that we are not going to believe.

In order to think this way, much less to have Donald Trump, Fox News, Matt Drudge and gawd knows who else actively peddling it, you have to believe that the IRS tax records and someone's college transcripts are things of equal importance. Yes, this one person over here may have made 70 million dollars or so by closing factories and turning their employees into breakfast sausages for dogs, but that other person over there got a C- on their essay on why the works of Chaucer are inherently more danceable than those of Herman Melville, so it all balances out. Or, perhaps, we are to take an entire decade of tax returns from a fabulously wealthy financier to be something that can be dismissed as youthful indiscretion. I was a young lad, back when I was running the Olympic Games, and the constant keg parties interfered with my ability to determine which of my many bank accounts were based in which countries.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump is quite certain that the nation would absolutely freak out if we were to see the college transcripts of a young Barack Obama. He hasn't seen them, but he's sure. I have to imagine that the president is at this point seriously considering releasing those old transcripts just to mess with Trump again, presuming he even hears about Trump at all, which is probably not terribly likely. Revealing the odd humiliating grade here would be a small price to pay for continuing our new national pastime of very publicly making Donald Trump look like an idiot.

I'm not sure what possessed the Romney campaign to embrace this guy, either. Yes, he fits the Mitt demographic perfectly, although Donald Trump is a bit of a pauper compared to Mitt Romney. But I've yet to find any situation where his mouth advice has, erm, helped.