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From The Reporter’s Notebook
Agree or Disagree?
Josh Marshall: “It is no exaggeration to say the driving themes of last night’s program — with a brief interlude of uplift from Melania Trump — were a pervasive vision of insecurity, violence and bloodshed, committed by national outsiders and abetted by the betrayals of political enemies. We debate the definition of fascism and just what governmental structures it involves. But setting that largely academic and unhelpful debate aside, this is precisely the kind of febrile victimology and demands for aggression and revenge against enemies that gives rise to it. ‘Fascism’ is a distraction that is more cudgel than explanatory device. What Trump is is a would-be authoritarian ruler. And, as we’ve discussed, authoritarian rules require violence and disorder because it is their justification for rule.”
Say What?!
“This concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd.”
– Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson offered a bizarre defense of Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech on the first night of the RNC.
BUZZING: Today in the Hive
From a TPM Prime member: “Melania Trump’s speech — This is LITERALLY the easiest speech of the entire convention. No one expects the candidate’s wife to get into the weeds on policy, or to attack the other candidate. All she has to do is get up there, speak some platitudes, say some nice things about her husband (ok, maybe not the easiest speech) and move along. But yet she went ahead and completely lifted it from Michelle Obama’s speech in 2008. The fact that the Trump campaign can’t even get such a simple thing right isn’t even shocking any more. It feels more and more like it’s just par for the course.”
Related: Melania Trump reportedly had a heavy hand in revising and finalizing her plagiarized convention speech.
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