In normal years, when a nominee’s wife is caught plagiarizing the sitting first lady in her convention speech, the staff writer who wrote the speech would be swiftly dispatched amid lots of tut-tutting from the campaign. But oh are we ever not in a normal year.
In true Trump fashion, they took a woman who is by all accounts bright and accomplished in her own right and had to lay on the gilding with a trowel. Their attempts to make Melania into the modern day composite of Marie Antoinette and Marie Curie have now backfired in more ways than anyone could have imagined.
First, they announced, and now cling desperately to, the fiction that she wrote this speech herself with as little help as possible. This is the biggest stage she will likely ever have to herself (if there is any justice in this world) and there would be no shame at all in working with speechwriters to pull this together. But noooooo, they couldn’t help themselves from injecting some silicone to plump up her intelligence.
So now instead of just finding some underling to hang out to dry, they have to wrestle with the uncomfortable spin that Melania herself plagiarized the speech — or as they are now saying there is no plagiarism despite whole phrases being lifted verbatim.
As long as the press doesn’t let this go (and plagiarism is understandably a cardinal sin for them) I expect the explanations to continue to become more and more tortured. But since admitting mistakes — and admitting that they are not the best campaigners that have ever existed — is anathema to the Trump cabal, they cannot walk this back. They have run headlong into colliding falsehoods and will continue to dissemble as long as they can.
Of course now that there is an opening all the biographical information for Mrs. Trump is fair game and there are already accusations that the claims she has a degree in design and architecture are similarly false.
I feel bad for her because this is going to be a rough few days and weeks (and the incident will likely make the first paragraph of her obituary someday), but she made her own choices.
But I could not be more thrilled to watch her husband’s campaign shoot itself in the foot AND the head simultaneously. As many have said, pass the popcorn.