Monday and Tuesday RNC are in the books. We have a lot more material on Monday to work with (there are the open threads from last night here), but don’t miss Lucifer Gets A Shoutout At The Republican National Convention Thanks To Ben Carson because you only live once.
In any case, Donald Trump is now the nominee and the GOP as we knew it is gone. No small government party, it’s now a party of resentment and xenophobia.
1. Trump is a management disaster 2. Melania plagiarized Michelle 3. Monday night was fascism
People are only talking about plagiarism. Journalists are subject matter experts on plagiarism (taught how to recognize, and how not not do), and they are comfortable with the topic. They are far less comfortable with fascism, authoritarianism, punishment and death (the other Monday night topics.)
But we can find some.
Brian Beutler:
Whether Melania knew she was reading plagiarized text or not (and I think it’s quite likely she did not) it’s just devastating to see a campaign premised on the imagined notion of Obama incompetence get caught stealing from Obama’s own operation.
But the power of the images is actually much deeper. They don’t just negate something central to Trump’s appeal. They amplify one (actually more than one) of the main knocks on Trump himself: That he’s sloppy, erratic, in so many ways the opposite of the virtues he claims to embody. And, let’s not gloss over it, this is a depiction of a campaign—a campaign that nurtures white grievance and resentment—trying to profit off the work of a black woman, from an African American family that Trump and his supporters regularly belittle. The fact that the plagiarized text in question was about the value of hard work just makes matters worse. A mortifying, calamitous, self-immolating moment.
David Frum:
Ten Reasons Why Melania Trump’s Speech Will Have a Lasting Impact
Since Sunday, every journalist at this convention has been collecting examples of the Trump campaign’s failures and incompetence: the quarrel with Ohio Governor John Kasich, the absent senators and governors, the no-show donors, the convention’s financial embarrassments, the floor fight over rules, the lack of a proper schedule, and the defective apps and other technology. Suddenly, there is one easy-to-understand incident that encapsulates in one grim joke all this convention’s cavalcade of derp.
Alex Shephard:
Finally, there’s the press’s obvious unease about confronting Melania Trump too forcefully. Trump is a non-politician with little public speaking experience, but more than that, she’s a potential First Lady, and American First Ladies occupy an unusual role in American political life. Their positions are simultaneously political and apolitical, and per journalistic norms, they tend not to deserve the scrutiny their partners receive as a matter of course. (Melania’s now-controversial speech—a bland homily in an extraordinarily political setting—is itself a testament to First Ladies’ ambiguous position.) That Trump plagiarized her speech from the second-most scrutinized First Lady in presidential history is yet another irony of this scandal. The most scrutinized First Lady in history? Her husband’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Let’s get some policy in. Health reporter Dan Diamond talked with a Republican policy wonk (Lanhee Chan, Romney and Rubio) about coming to terms with Trump. The podcast is ~ 50 min, but the thinking/rationalization behind coming to terms was interesting. If it’s not “I can control this, it’s “I can influence this”. After all, that’s what they live for:
Chen also addressed perceptions of a so-called wonk gap between Democrats and Republicans, with liberal thinkers like Paul Krugman bemoaning that they have relatively few conservative counterparts with whom to seriously debate policy. While he disputed that argument, Chen acknowledged that the Obama administration's two terms have fostered liberal policy ideas while the conservative movement has stagnated.
On the left, "you have people constantly going in and out of government, feeding … a virtuous cycle of people who go into government, get experience, and come out thinking more thoughtfully about these issues," Chen said. "Republicans haven’t been in power in eight years [so] we haven’t had that churn."
And despite all his concern about Trump, Chen still thinks the policies put forward by Hillary Clinton would be worse for the nation.
"They both cause me great concern," Chen admitted, but "Trump's more of a blank slate" so it's easier to be worried about what Clinton would do, because the presumptive Democratic nominee has been much more specific. (Clinton has released 205 pages of policy proposals; Trump's website lists only seven fleshed-out policy positions.)
What they miss is that this campaign is about gaining power for Trump and no one else. The policy wonks generally have less influence than they hope, if any, but you can see what the path to acceptance is. Scary and wrong, but a path nonetheless.
TPM:
With the campaign reeling, Lewandowski went on CNN and dumped all over Manafort, his former rival within the campaign until Trump fired Lewandowski.
"I think Paul [Manafort] needs to take a deep look inside, and understand what the process was, make sure the protocols were in place," he said. "I think if it was Paul Manafort, he would do the right thing and resign."
Ron Fournier:
The Republicans' Disastrous Day One
The Trump campaign botched the vice-presidential rollout, insulted a key state’s popular governor, saw chaos erupt on the convention floor, and ended with a plagiarism scandal.
Aaron Blake:
Update: Add a new one to the list: Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson tells The Hill that, "This concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd."
The words and comments spoken by Melania Trump in part of her speech Monday night were so similar to those offered by Michelle Obama in 2008 that, after midnight Tuesday, CNN's Jake Tapper declared it: "This is plagiarism."
Sitting next to him, Wolf Blitzer even offered the Trump campaign an out, suggesting Trump had been done a disservice by a speechwriter. Blitzer encouraged the author to come forward and apologize and even said that "we feel bad for Melania Trump."
The Trump campaign is not taking that out. In fact, it's pretending that nobody did anything wrong.
Get ready for some pretty brazen defenses.
Rick Wilson (R operative, no love for Hillary):
Trump and the cult of stupid
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is the culture of Trump. Every adviser to Trump realizes that kissing his ring is the key to survival.
The empirical facts of the world outside Trump’s bubble are to be ignored or dismissed. For all the talk from Team Reince that Trump is improving and pivoting and professionalizing the campaign, it’s patently obvious that he’s still making it up as he goes along.
Hillary Clinton is a terrible, clunky and mistrusted candidate. She’s deeply unpopular. Against anyone other than Donald Trump, she’d likely be well behind in the polls. However, Hillary Clinton is raising money, spending it to communicate against Trump and doing the boring, low-glamour high-reward campaign tasks that make her the odds-on favorite in November. There’s nothing random or ad-hoc about her campaign. It’s grinding, dull and ruthless.
Trump supporters may think that doesn’t matter. They’re in for a painful shock.
Greg Sargent:
So Trump, whose new convention theme is “make America safe again,” thinks this is 1968, and he’ll be able to do what Nixon did. In his 1968 acceptance speech, Nixon painted a picture of a country sliding into chaos and mayhem, referencing “cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” “sirens in the night,” and “Americans dying on distant battlefields.” And he vowed to stand up for “the forgotten Americans,” “the non-shouters,” and “the non-demonstrators.” Nixon added that “they are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes,” and they are “the real voice of America.”
As Michael Cohen put it in his terrific book on the 1968 campaign, this speech became the template for Nixon’s victorious campaign message, one that resonated with “millions of Americans” who “felt the country slipping away from underneath their feet,” one that “spoke to very real and very raw emotions in the American body politic.”
Yet there are many differences between 1968 and today that call into question whether such a strategy will work for Trump this time.
Jeet Heer:
The GOP Is the Party of Death
On an apocalyptic convention night, Republicans wallowed in the pornography of suffering and the need to punish Hillary Clinton.
Giuliani earned the most enthusiastic response from the Republican crowd of the evening because he made the message of impending death the most explicit of anyone speaking. But he was only the loudest ranter of the evening; otherwise his message wasn’t unique. One way or another, almost all the speakers came back to the matter of death.
There were no less than five parents on stage Monday evening in Cleveland who spoke about dead children: Pat Smith, whose son died in Benghazi, said, “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. Personally.” The mother of a dead Navy Seal and three parents whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants also spoke. And there was an extended speech by survivors of the Benghazi attack. All these witnesses and relatives of the dead, each with their personal grief and horror stories, gave the evening a morbid feel.
TPM:
Gloomy Old Party: GOP Clings To Themes Of Threats, Violence, And Betrayal
The Republican convention kicked off not with a celebration of Donald Trump’s ascendency nor with a hopeful vision to quell the country’s growing unrest. Instead, the first night of the Republican convention painted a bleak picture of a country on edge, under threat from enemies both foreign and domestic, and with the specter of violence never far from the surface.
"There's no next election. This is it. There's no more time for us left to revive our great country,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in his slashing speech to the convention. “No more time to repeat our mistakes of the Clinton/Obama years. Washington needs a complete turnaround, and Donald Trump is the agent of change, and he will be the leader of the change we need!"
Monday night's rhetoric fit right in with the controversial candidacy Trump had been mounting for months.