How eager is CNN for a Trump/Birther traffic windfall? Not only did they rush a story about this “scoop” onto their website hours before Cooper’s show airs, they posted a sneak preview of the exchange to entice viewers to watch. Who can resist a rainbow of extra page views? Not I, my friends, not I.

Real estate mogul Donald Trump’s latest claim about President Obama’s birth certificate is that it’s missing.

“Well I’ve been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday. “I’ve been told that it’s not there or it doesn’t exist. And if that’s the case it’s a big problem.”

When asked from whom he received the information, Trump said he didn’t want to say and that he feels bad about the situation.

He feels bad because he’d much prefer to talk about the important policy issues facing the country, every one of which turns out to be “so easy” to solve. He also digressed from his pursuit of a serious policy debate in an interview with the AP today to say that he’s heard Obama was a “terrible student, terrible” while at Columbia and Harvard. And he reassured the Des Moines Register that “Iowa is very, very important to me” and that “I’m a very conservative person. Extremely conservative.” So there you go. You’re now caught up on Trump news.

Exit question: Should we start a pool on when he’ll reveal the findings of his investigators? I’ll take “during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.” Unless we nominate him, we’ll never know the truth…