TRUMP V. TRUMP.(The Talk of the Town)

Never having met Timothy O'Brien, the Times reporter who finds himself on the receiving end of a five-billion-dollar libel-and-defamation suit from Donald Trump, I don't presume to know whether he's having fun yet. But I doubt that I'm alone among members of the Fourth Estate in experiencing a twinge of envy. Talk about pennies from Heaven! Overnight, sales of O'Brien's book "TrumpNation," the vivisection of the alleged mogul which prompted the litigation, moved it from 123,329 to 466 in the Amazon.com rankings.

Trump's complaint says that O'Brien has damaged his business reputation by lowballing his net worth. According to Forbes, he is "worth" $2.7 billion; according to Trump, "read Forbes and double it." O'Brien reports that the true figure is in the range of $150 million to $250 million. Leaving aside for the moment that the Forbes 400 list, the annual soft-core glimpse of the American uber-plutocracy, tends to be about as reliable as, say, rumors of weapons of mass destruction hidden in the shrubbery at Mar-a-Lago, I hope O'Brien and his publisher will pause before writing Trump a ten-figure check. They should let this drag out a while. Getting on Trump's nerves can be a rewarding pastime.

Nine years ago, I wrote a Profile of Trump for this magazine. Along the way, we had many one-on-one encounters, during which I occasionally found him likable, even intentionally amusing. Without attempting to determine his net worth--I'm hardly that deft a reporter--I knew that it was a fraction of whatever he claimed. In part, my source was Forbes. In 1996--a few years after a de-facto bankruptcy in which Trump's creditors were forced to write off $700 million of personally guaranteed loans to him--he somehow re-insinuated himself onto the Forbes list at 373, with $450 million. The actual figure, he assured me, was $2.25 billion. I marvel anew when I recall what he said as he handed me a copy of his unaudited financial statement: "I've never shown this to a reporter before." Almost invariably, when "TRUMP" appears on a building the real financial risks--and the controlling equity--belong to others. "TrumpNation" persuasively demonstrates this fun-with-mirrors methodology. And that's why Trump is angry.

He's also still angry with me, I'm pretty sure. In "The Art of the Comeback," one of his ghostwritten endeavors, published a few months after the Profile appeared, he devoted a couple of pages to attacking me: "When [Singer] came into the office I ...