When Donald Trump wrote "I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth."

An AP writer has dug up a letter Trump wrote to the NYT in 2005 in response to a review of a collection of New Yorker profiles written by Mark Singer. The review said:

The only instance in which Singer throws and lands a sucker punch is in a 1997 profile of the pre-"Apprentice" Donald Trump, in which his tone becomes a little arch. That Trump is already a caricature of a caricature makes him too easy a target, with neither the foot speed nor the wit to defend himself. A harder thing to do, perhaps impossible, would have been to find the one lonely component of Trump's character that wasn't manufactured as a brand strategy. It is a small quibble, certainly, as most New Yorkers, including me, would readily climb the arch in Washington Square to drop a flowerpot filled with nasturtiums on Trump's astonishing head if given half a chance to do so.

Trump wrote (or had someone write over his signature):

I can remember when Tina Brown was in charge of The New Yorker and a writer named Mark Singer interviewed me for a profile. He was depressed. I was thinking, O.K., expect the worst. Not only was Tina Brown dragging The New Yorker to a new low, this writer was drowning in his own misery, which could only put me in a skeptical mood regarding the outcome of their combined interest in me. Misery begets misery, and they were a perfect example of this credo.

Jeff MacGregor, the reviewer of ''Character Studies,'' a collection of Singer's New Yorker profiles (Aug. 21), including the one about me, writes poorly. His painterly turn with nasturtiums sounds like a junior high school yearbook entry. Maybe he and Mark Singer belong together. Some people cast shadows, and other people choose to live in those shadows. To each his own. They are entitled to their choices.

Most writers want to be successful. Some writers even want to be good writers. I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth. When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I'll read one of his books. But it will be a long time -- he was not born with great writing ability. Until then, maybe he should concentrate on finding his own ''lonely component'' and then try to develop himself into a world-class writer, as futile as that may be, instead of having to write about remarkable people who are clearly outside of his realm.

I've been a best-selling author for close to 20 years. Whether you like it or not, facts are facts. The highly respected Joe Queenan mentioned in his article ''Ghosts in the Machine'' (March 20) that I had produced ''a steady stream of classics'' with ''stylistic seamlessness'' and that the ''voice'' of my books remained noticeably constant to the point of being an ''astonishing achievement.'' This was high praise coming from an accomplished writer. From losers like Jeff MacGregor, whom I have never met, or Mark Singer, I do not do nearly as well. But I'll gladly take Joe Queenan over Singer and MacGregor any day of the week -- it's a simple thing called talent!

I have no doubt that Singer's and MacGregor's books will do badly -- they just don't have what it takes. Maybe someday they'll astonish us by writing something of consequence.

Ha ha. Very funny. Here's the whole Mark Singer profile, as it was originally published in The New Yorker in 1997 (the Marla Maples era). Nice photo of Trump jumping. Sample:

Of course, the “comeback” Trump is much the same as the Trump of the eighties; there is no “new” Trump, just as there was never a “new” Nixon. Rather, all along there have been several Trumps: the hyperbole addict who prevaricates for fun and profit; the knowledgeable builder whose associates profess awe at his attention to detail; the narcissist whose self-absorption doesn’t account for his dead-on ability to exploit other people’s weaknesses; the perpetual seventeen-year-old who lives in a zero-sum world of winners and “total losers,” loyal friends and “complete scumbags”; the insatiable publicity hound who courts the press on a daily basis and, when he doesn’t like what he reads, attacks the messengers as “human garbage”; the chairman and largest stockholder of a billion-dollar public corporation who seems unable to resist heralding overly optimistic earnings projections, which then fail to materialize, thereby eroding the value of his investment—in sum, a fellow both slippery and naïve, artfully calculating and recklessly heedless of consequences....

We then drove down to 40 Wall Street, where members of a German television crew were waiting for Trump to show them around. (“This will be the finest office building anywhere in New York. Not just downtown—anywhere in New York.”) Along the way, we stopped for a light at Forty-second Street and First Avenue. The driver of a panel truck in the next lane began waving, then rolled down his window and burbled, “I never see you in person!” He was fortyish, wore a blue watch cap, and spoke with a Hispanic inflection. “But I see you a lot on TV.”...

Later, Trump said to me, “You want to know what total recognition is? I’ll tell you how you know you’ve got it. When the Nigerians on the street corners who don’t speak a word of English, who have no clue, who’re selling watches for some guy in New Jersey—when you walk by and those guys say, ‘Trump! Trump!’ That’s total recognition.”...

[E]very square inch [of Trump Tower] belonged to Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. “Trump”—a fellow with universal recognition but with a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience, a creature everywhere and nowhere, uniquely capable of inhabiting it all at once, all alone.

From the new AP article:

"Naturally, I wanted to believe that Trump was the sole author [of the 2005 letter to the NYT], and certain evidence suggested exactly that — especially the ham-fisted braggadocio and the delightfully obtuse misreading of Joe Queenan's slathered-on irony," Singer wrote. "But what one has learned about and heard from Trump in the meanwhile raises certain doubts: If, as we're now given to understand, he can't concentrate long enough to read a two-page memo, much less a literary novel, the claim to have read Updike/Roth/Pamuk rings nakedly false."...

Singer would recall responding to Trump. He mailed him a check for $37.82, "a small token" of his gratitude for the letter. He suspected Trump would answer back.

"Ten days later I get a letter, Trump organization envelope," Singer said during an appearance at the 2009 New Yorker Festival. "Inside is my letter. He's returned it and across the bottom he has written, 'Mark, you are a total loser.'"

But, according to Singer, Trump did cash the check.

$37.82 — is that some kind of numerology?