Reed F. Richardson, author of “American Rifle: A Biography of the AR-15” for TPM’s new longform magazine The Arch, will stop by the Hive (Prime sub req) tomorrow to talk more about the topics covered in the piece. Submit questions on the history of the AR-15, its cultural and political role, and understanding the symbolism behind “America’s rifle.”
Drop your questions in now or between 12 and 1 p.m. EST on Thursday.
Now Donald Trump Jr lifted some lines!!!! Check it out.
As this story has unfolded, it appears that the author of a Spring article in the American Conservative, Frank Buckley, also helped Don Jr. write his speech. So Buckley was in essence recycling his own anecdote into a speech he was helping write for Don Jr. That is certainly irregular for a speech writer. But there’s no injured party since it’s Buckley reusing something presumably he wrote himself. What’s amazing about this is how exactly, after last night, did either Trump or Buckley or really anyone else involved think it might be a good idea to remove this passage from the speech?
The deeper story here is that Melania and Don Jr have seriously upped the ante for Trump on who he’ll plagiarize Thursday evening.
Chris Christie tells donors he and Donald Trump have a plan to purge Obama era appointees and Democrats from the federal workforce.
We have more information about just what happened with Melania Trump’s speech. It seems that it was almost entirely the work of Melania and Donald’s recent ghostwriter who’s penned books like “Donald J. Trump: Think Like a Champion”, “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire” and “Trump: How to Get Rich.”
Donald Trump Jr: “We are going to put Americans first, all Americans, not a special class of crony elites at the top of the heap.”
So we’ve got this evening’s version of “lock her up.”
Christie earlier only barely resisted taking up the “lock her up” chant.
“Betrayer.”
One thing I’m watching for tonight is how many speakers call for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned or lead crowd chants to that effect.
We were watching this earlier during the roll call. Alaska reported its delegates split between the various candidates. And the chair basically replied, ‘Cool, all delegates for Trump.’ We were talking about it in the office and couldn’t quite figure what was up. I figured it was just something I’d missed since no one seemed to be making a big deal of it. It seems like this was what was up.
Over the weekend, I outlined my heuristic of Trumpian action which my high school classmate John Scalzi has now dubbed ‘Trump’s Razor‘ in honor of ‘Occam’s Razor’, the foundational mode of reasoning devised by the 14th century scholastic theologian William of Occam. According to Trump’s Razor: “ascertain the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts” and that answer is likely correct. Last night ran very late at TPM thanks to the Melania/plagiarism debacle. As I was walking to my apartment well past midnight I started considering the implications of Trump’s Razor and I shuddered and recoiled at what it told me. To phrase the principle in Occam’s terms, it tells us ‘the stupidest scenario is always to be preferred’. And what was the stupidest possible scenario? Right: Melania wrote the speech herself.