Donald Trump's potential run: Policy or publicity?

WASHINGTON - He's the big-talking billionaire who's talking more than ever.

"The United States is becoming the laughing stock of the world," Donald Trump said earlier this year here at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford reports that Trump is talking a lot about Donald Trump, even his failed marriages.

"It's very difficult for a woman to be married to me because I work," he said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. "I work all the time."

He's saying things most politicians don't - but that famous candor also can be a problem.

"I have a great relationship with the blacks," he said on Albany, N.Y., talk radio. "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

On Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," Bill O'Reilly asked Trump, "Is there a Muslim problem in the world?"

"Absolutely," Trump said. "I don't know the Swedish people knocking down the World Trade Center."

Then there's his focus on President Obama's citizenship.

"He hasn't proven, he hasn't shown his birth certificate, he shows a piece of paper that has nothing to do with a birth certificate," Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Nevermind that the president produced a certificate of live birth and it's a widely discredited issue and one the other Republicans have all but discarded.

Obama: I was born in Hawaii, lack horns

"Facts and Donald Trump do not always coincide," said Jeff Zeleny, a political correspondent for The New York Times. "He doesn't need to. He's not a public official who has to be held to a higher standard."

Everything about Donald Trump is exaggerated: his reality TV shows, the beauty queens, that hair and his gold-plated real estate empire.

Now he's talking about the nation's most famous piece of real estate. And no one knows what to make of it.

"What is he doing? What is his objective?" Rush Limbaugh has asked.

Could all this be some sort of sinister plot to split up the Republican vote?

"Some people think that he's actually running at the behest of Democrats," Limbaugh said.

But odds are he won't actually run. If he gets in the race, Trump will have to open up his financial records - something he might not want to do with his complicated financial past.

Whatever is driving him, a poll this week had him tied for first for the Republican nomination.

Early polls are mainly about name recognition - and everyone knows the name Trump.

But there is a message behind Trump's rise: Voters aren't satisfied with what they're getting from the other candidates or from Washington.