WATCH: Melania Trump Sounds Just Like Michelle Obama
Melania Trump, the third wife of Republican nominee Donald Trump, is accused of plagiarizing a Michelle Obama speech during her address to the GOP convention on Monday.
So that's pretty blatant, right? pic.twitter.com/EPnHME7afV
— Mike Hearn (@mikehearn) July 19, 2016
It’s definitely plagiarism, and Melania definitely didn’t write the speech, even though she claimed to have written it “with as little help as possible.” Some lazy speech writer probably copy-pasted the Michelle Obama speech and hoped nobody would notice.
It’s embarrassing and unprofessional, but it’s not a huge gamechanger, as some have suggested. It may very well be forgotten by the end of day, eclipsed by some other embarrassing and unprofessional thing.
Almost every response to the situation, from defenders and critics alike, has been wrong. So. Many. Hot. Takes.
Christie: Melania's speech is not plagiarism because it's 93% different https://t.co/d9dIYd5PoV pic.twitter.com/sCXyu8guxG
— The Hill (@thehill) July 19, 2016
Seriously? Is he subtly trolling his master after getting passed over for VP?
Manafort on plagiarism: "When Hillary Clinton is threatened by a female, the first thing she does is try to destroy the person." What?
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) July 19, 2016
Trump advisor Sarah Huckabee Sanders when asked who should be fired after Melania debacle: "Hillary Clinton."
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) July 19, 2016
At least they’re on message. What did the Trump campaign have to say?
Not much, as it turns out.
Here is the RNC'a chief strategist citing My Little Pony to argue that Melania Trump did not plagiarize her speech pic.twitter.com/eRifu41wHC
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) July 19, 2016
In any other context, this is would be somewhat absurd and noteworthy. At this point, it’s just another example of the Republican Party debasing itself in order to make Donald Trump seem like a serious candidate. (He’s not.)
There were also a bunch of hot takes about why Melania’s plagiarism is “a certified big deal.”
.@ThePlumLineGS explains why Melania's plagiarism is a certified big deal: https://t.co/qjzsiFWDeh
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) July 19, 2016
The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent writes:
What’s galling about this is that Donald Trump’s political career has been propelled to no small degree by an effort to deny the very legitimacy of those values and aspirations on the part of the Obamas, in service of the idea that they are basically imposters, or frauds, who don’t actually harbor the values they claim and don’t really deserve the success they’ve attained. Obviously neither of the Trumps would say this about Ms. Obama. But this is, at bottom, the subtext of Trump’s birtherism about Obama himself — which amounts to arguing that the Obamas don’t really belong in the White House, i.e., they didn’t legitimately achieve their current status.
He goes on to quote The New Republic‘s Brian Buetler, who predicts that this latest Trump campaign screw up will be “more devastating and defining” than all the other ones:
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.
OK, we get it. Calm down. The Trump campaign is inept and unprofessional. That’s not breaking news. It’s barely news.
These are fine efforts to intellectualize the “meaning” of Melania’s plagiarism, and the broader civilizational implications, or whatever. Hot takes all around. They will get tremendous kudos on Twitter. But few people will care, or even notice. Trump will still lose in November.
Several weeks from now, even prominent political Tweeters will have forgotten this minor episode after Trump throws a tantrum and replaces Mike Pence with Newt Gingrich on the ticket, or divorces Melania, or retweets a neo-Nazi calling Hillary Clinton the c-word, or whatever.
