So today I guess the Trump Campaign released this statement where a Trump Organization staffer took the blame for the Melania Convention speech plagiarizing Michelle Obama.
To the casual observer, this might seem look a smart move: it allows the Trump’s to look like they were mostly not to blame for any wrongdoing. Even though getting any sense of admission of wrongdoing on their part is always like pulling teeth. If you are the dentist, and the patient is a bear. Who had to sit through a Scott Baio monologue.
At least it would have, had the Trumps not already spent all of yesterday building two narratives:
A) Melania Trump, wrote the speech herself, without any sort of inspiration from Michelle Obama, and
B) It wasn’t plagiarized.
So the letter released today doesn’t support either of those two claims, it actually reinforces them.
By releasing this letter of blame, the Trump Campaign admitted the following:
A) Melania Trump did not write the speech herself, and
B) Yes, it was plagiarized.
So all the letter was doing was proving that their denials were blatantly false. You can’t just go and say “No it’s wasn’t plagiarism” to saying “it was somebody else doing the plagiarizing.” THAT STILL MAKES IT PLAGIARISM.
I hope for your sake, that is true, Donald. This plagiarism story, damning as it was, was essentially going to drop off the news cycle, as well as the consciousness of the rest of the American audience. But by releasing that letter from Melania’s speechwriter, you have all but guaranteed that this story lingers for yet another news cycle.
If Donald Trump was my boss I would be embarrassed too. That’s why I am not surprised that the speechwriter in question offered her resignation. She probably understands that, in her line of work, she’ll have a better chance salvaging her career if she is just known as a plagiarist, than as a snake-oil-peddling crony for the Trumps.
And even though this diary is predicated on the argument that the confession makes the Trump look foolish twice, I am possibly undercounting: I think the most damning part about this is the statement of how horrible an executive Donald Trump makes.
There’s a reason mistakes like these in other organizational settings don’t normally put the low-level employee in as much professional danger as this scenario put this speechwriter. That is because, at the end of the day the head of the organization is supposed to be able to vouch for the work that their organization produces. By allowing the speechwriter to go public with her mistake, what she is actually saying is that the Trumps could not even be bothered to review her work, and give it their approval beforehand. If they had at least done that, perhaps they would have had a better response to the fallout than to simply deny everything. For a campaign built on your ability to present yourself as a competent leader, the least you can do is shield your employees from professionally bungling a major transaction with the public, that they don’t really have any authority to execute on their own. This is not how good business leaders do business, and expect their business to stay afloat. It would be like the Ford Motor Company never doing any quality control on their products. Or as another example, imagine if it were a company that builds pacemakers. You need to be on top of everything that your employees are producing, and if you are not, it speaks more about your competence as a leader, more than your employees.
The Trumps are frauds, and if they had just left the controversy for what it was, that would have been the most that could have been made from it. But now, because the Trump Campaign saw fit to release this statement, it not only reinforces the fact that they are frauds, it also makes them look like complete fools.
If Donald Trump can’t even take the responsibility for his employees’ mistakes, he isn’t fit to run a hot dog stand, let alone a country built on democracy.