CNN is reporting some very important news about talk show host Monica Crowley, Trump’s pick as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council: she is a plagiarist.
And this is not your garden-variety, “oops I copied a few things accidentally” excuse kind of plagiarism. This is massive, systematic, intentional plagiarism. CNN’s revelations of Crowley’s plagiarism go on and on and on.
Trump’s transition team immediately jumped to defend Crowley’s plagiarism:
HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller. Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.
No, good journalism is not a politically motivated attack. And the fact that a major publisher published plagiarism does not make it cease to be plagiarism. Will HarperCollins ruin its reputation in the publishing industry by trying to defend this obvious intellectual dishonesty?
Of course, we know that intellectual dishonesty is regarded as a necessary qualification for Donald Trump and his administration, as it has been for the conservative movement for decades. How many other conservative best-sellers are full of plagiarism that no one in the media has bothered to expose?
But this appointment is absolutely intolerable, and completely indefensible. Will Trump really want to spend his time defending the fraud of a talk show host turned PR hack for Trumpism?
As I note in my book, Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire, Trump is a pathological liar. But the last thing he wants to do is to expose that fact by appointing an obvious plagiarist to help him communicate.
Crossposted at AcademeBlog.