What about the money? In the final tally, Piers raised $376,000 in the auction, compared to $64,000 from Trace. That is a large margin -- almost four times more (TM Don, Jr.). "And $6,000 of that was mine," Ivanka fails to add. However, Trace raised $38,000 on ticket sales, handily beating Piers's paltry $12,000. Of course, Piers gave a bunch of his tickets away to servicepeople to try to jack up the auction bidding. There's some crosstalk, and Carol defends Piers's decision. Trump brings up Piers's move of bringing in Simon, mainly so he can remind everyone that Simon and Trump are friends. Piers says he raised a lot more money overall, but Don, Jr. calls him on blowing off one of the three criteria, namely ticket sales (the handy thing about having Don, Jr. around is that he rarely says anything of substance, but when he does you can count on it being wrong or irrelevant). Trace makes the argument that his donors don't have as much money to give as Piers's do, which is true, but he goes too far and makes the tactical error of accusing Piers of putting them down. Piers not only gets offended at "the inference that I was somehow belittling your donors," he wants Trace to take it back. And on that note, we go to commercial, which is fine with me.

Coming back, Trump takes Trace's side, accusing Piers of thinking it, even if he didn't say it. Piers still objects, but Trump has already moved on. He takes Piers's team to task for skimping on the food, which Piers defends as a strategic decision: get the donors drunk. Stephen piously says he doesn't approve of using alcohol to separate people from their money. Piers again calls Stephen on his hypocrisy, pointing out that he only ever makes these kinds of moralistic statements in the board room (which I believe is correct, as far as we've seen), and his former lifestyle makes them kind of rich coming from him in the first place. Trump comes to Stephen's defense. "Why are you sweating again?" Trump asks a babbling Piers. "You sweat a lot!" Hee. Ivanka asks Piers if it wouldn't help him more to be a little less rude. Piers once again claims to be fine with the whole evil antagonist role he says he 's been cast in (never get tired of hearing that), which gives Trump an opening to run with the whole good versus evil thing again. "The good, the bad, and ugly," he says. "But who's the ugly?" "Lennox," Piers answers instantly, cracking me up. He says that he's not there to be a nice guy, but to raise money for charity.

Trump asks Trace to respond to that, and Trace says he's there to represent the people his charity is trying to help, and refused to bring dishonor to himself or to that charity's beneficiaries. So did Piers do that? In Trace's opinion, Piers has been "questionable," not to mention unnecessarily rude. Piers continues to defend his rudeness, and Trace admits that he and Piers worked well together to bring the event off. Trump says this decision is the toughest thing he's had to do in a long time. Tougher than the time he couldn't decide at all and ended up firing no one? Because that seemed pretty tough.