Donald Trump lashed out at New York Times columnist Gail Collins in a letter to the paper published on Friday.
Trump was responding to a very negative column Collins wrote last Saturday. In the column, Collins derided Trump's presidential aspirations and mocked him as "the man who can make Bill O'Reilly look like the most sensible guy in the room." And, of course, Collins lambasted Trump's full-throated embrace of the "birther" movement. Moreover, she recounted a previous tangle she'd had with Trump:
During one down period, I referred to him in print as a "financially embattled thousandaire" and he sent me a copy of the column with my picture circled and "The Face of a Dog!" written over it.
Clearly, Trump still counts Collins among his major enemies, because he did not hold back in his letter to the editor:
Even before Gail Collins was with the New York Times, she has written nasty and derogatory articles about me. Actually, I have great respect for Ms. Collins in that she has survived so long with so little talent. Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers), is not at a very high level. More importantly, her facts are wrong!
Trump then dug in further, repeating many of the arguments he has made recently about why President Obama may not have been born in the U.S. (all of which have been debunked, sometimes directly to Trump himself.)
Collins responded in her next column, printed on Saturday. Collins did not seem too perturbed by the letter, writing that "although Trump and I have had our differences in the past, I never felt it was personal. In fact, until now, I have refrained from noting that I once got an aggrieved message from him in which he misspelled the word 'too.'" She then rebuffed each of the claims Trump made about Obama's birth.