Campaign Action
God help you if you disagree with Donald Trump. It doesn't matter what party you're in, Trump and his minions will "squelch" you, to use the word of a Republican delegate and 25-year party loyalist from the District of Columbia. Chip Nottingham told MSNBC his delegation's 19 votes were robbed even though Trump didn't earn a single one of them during the March 12 D.C. primary.
It was the same story for the Alaska delegation’s Dave Donnelly, who contested the Republican National Committee's vote count of his state and asked for a recount from the floor. Though Donnelly made clear that his state intended to give 12 delegates to Ted Cruz, 11 to Trump, and five to Marco Rubio, that's not how the RNC saw it.
"The secretary recorded it as 28 votes for Donald Trump," Donnelly told MSNBC. "We want them to honor the vote of the people of Alaska."
Ultimately, those people were not honored. Speaker Paul Ryan, presiding over the convention, let RNC chief Reince Priebus explain why the RNC would count the vote the way the RNC wanted to count the vote: 28 for Trump. And even worse, the explanation was all a total surprise to Donnelly:
I'm feeling like we did everything we could to honor the votes of the people of Alaska, and the RNC denied that. They didn't even consult with us about our own rules. They never mentioned this to us. They didn't talk to any of our attorneys about it. They didn't talk to any of our representatives on the RNC about it, and their interpretation is dead wrong. Because we suspended that rule at our convention. And so those rules didn't apply to us at all. They're wrong.
Donnelly got a taste of Trump justice shortly after the triumphant moment when the New York delegation’s votes pushed the billionaire over the threshold to claim the GOP nomination. As Trump's go-to guy Paul Manafort boasted last week, the anti-Trump movement got "crushed" at the Rules Committee, and that was clearly the spirit the campaign in tandem with the RNC carried over into this week.
For his part, Manafort also crushed all the plagiarism talk surrounding Melania Trump's Monday night speech. You know the one, where Michelle Obama miraculously predicted in 2008 exactly what Melania would utter eight years later, almost word for word. Plagiarism? Not so, says Manafort. CNN reports:
"There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values. She cares about her family," Manafort said. "To think that she'd be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy."
So far, no Trump campaign official has been held accountable and, according to Trump aides, no one ever will—cuz they said it never happened and so, it didn't. (UPDATE: More NYT reporting on the speech debacle may have found a culprit.)
Republican analyst Steve Schmidt drew a grim connection on MSNBC between what we're seeing now and what kind of incompetency that translates to in the Oval:
That speech was plagiarized. There's just no question about it. So when spokespeople for the Republican party, spokespeople for the campaign go out and say it was not plagiarized and they are trying to tell you that the sun sets in the east and rises in the west, it's just not true. [...] What this issue is fundamentally about as we talked about last night is, Donald Trump has said that our leaders are incompetent, he has said the federal government is broken and that he will fix it, he will fix it by bringing the best people into government and that he will impose accountability. Well, if you have an unwillingness to impose accountability on your campaign staff, how on earth do you intend to impose accountability on the head of the V.A.?
And so we continue peeling back the layers on what exactly Trump justice would look like from inside the White House—where anything that doesn’t match his reality or aspirations gets stamped out, shut down, cast aside, squelched, crushed. Pick your verb—if you're on the wrong side of Trump, forget about it.
UPDATE: And a fitting response to speechgate from the GOP nominee himself...