Why is The Donald doing what he’s doing?

Is he bonkers? Or is it all this just for the sheer hell of it? Maybe there’s money in it. There are television ratings to be had, that’s for sure. But could that be all there is in it for Trump to play the buffoon with his bogus birther claims? And now his new attack on Obama’s scholastic record.

He says he may want the Republican presidential nomination — he hasn’t decided for sure. But the way he’s going about it would make the nomination — if he got it — worth about as much as, say, a bankrupt casino.

So, why is he doing it?

I’ve consulted experts and finally found someone I think has the answer, a guy with a doctorate in witchcraft from Harvard, a skilled reader of zodiac charts and signs, a fellow who says he’s spent time with space aliens and claims a wizard’s ability to read the entrails of chickens. And his answer, while admittedly bit of a stretch, makes a strange kind of sense.

Trump is a mole.

You know what a mole is — a Democratic plant, someone infiltrated into the ranks of real GOP presidential candidates to sow confusion, muddy the issues, confuse the rank and file, and provide the kind of circus that a mindless television industry can’t resist. (If he didn’t exist, television would have had to invent him — or a facsimile).

Consider what Trump has accomplished for Democrats. He’s thrown a blanket of super celebrity over the rest of the GOP field. TV hasn’t time for the rest of the Repubs as long as The Donald is around; he could have filled the Coliseum in ancient Rome, rooting, of course, for the lions. (He likes winners).

At the same time, he’s managed to make fools of the right-wing TV and radio wackos who bought into his birther blather hoping to damage Barack Obama. He’s made Sean Hannity, a birther believer, look like the south end of a northward-bound horse. Rush Limbaugh, too; he’s swallowed the birther nonsense without so much as a hiccup.

We know The Donald is smart. We know that because he has told us so himself — over and over and over again, ad nauseum. But this birther thing is the work of a super strategist, someone more steeped in the arcane arts of down-and-dirty politics than even Trump can boast. Chicago-style politics, in other words.

If Rahm Emanuel was still at the White House, he’d be a prime suspect as the culprit who cooked up the Trump-as-birther bit. But Emanuel has decamped to Chicago, where he’s now mayor. Still, considering Obama’s roots, the Chicago connection can’t be dismissed so easily.

The Trump caper has all the earmarks of a plot that could only have been hatched there, where Republican campaigns and candidates for decades have gone to die. And, with Emanuel out, the finger now points at another Chicago operative, one newly ensconced at the White House.

It points to Bill Daley, Obama’s chief of staff.

To understand why this seems the only logical explanation, you have to appreciate how devilishly clever these Daleys can be. After all, they ran Chicago as a family business for most of the past 50 years and never once got indicted — which is a kind of first in Chicago. Only a Daley could have dreamed this one up. There’s no other plausible answer.

There you have it: the Trump caper is a Chicago-style con, with all the hoopla and razzle-dazzle normally associated with State Street politics. And gullible Republicans bought it all. Only Karl Rove, the GOP’s reigning Machiavelli, seems to have seen the light.

“Barack Obama wants Republicans to fall into this trap,” Rove said, “because he knows it discredits us with the vast majority of the American people.” How’d he find out? WikiLeaks?

How will it all end, now that Obama’s long-form birth certificate has been made public? My Harvard witchcraft contact thinks the last scene will be played out at a White House meeting, at which Daley will deliver this brief but unmistakable message to Trump that ends his crypto-campaign and the birther baloney with it:

"You're fired!"

John Farmer is a Star-Ledger columnist.