The irony of the Melania Trump plagiarism is that she was the only element of Monday night’s low-rent infomercial tableau that wasn’t saturated in violence, revanchism, Dolchstoss myth-making, and darkness — but it was tainted, too.
Tierney Sneed and Lauren Fox are spearheading our coverage in Cleveland, and their report from the scene captures much of what made the first day so disturbing. Here’s how Vin Weber put it when talking Trump:
“He has projected since day one kind of this broad image of strength. Not very concrete, not very specific, but a strong guy. That’s what scares me about him, too. I don’t want an authoritarian figure as president, but that will appeal to people in an insecure environment.”
Worth your read once you have plumbed the depths of the plagiarism ridiculousness.
A bewildered TPM Reader AV emails:
I’m writing to you as a long time reader and admirer of someone who has a pretty good handle on the entire Trump phenomenon. But after watching the Patricia Smith speech and reading your take on it, hours later I’m still having some trouble processing what I witnessed.
On MSNBC last night a bunch of really smart guys were saying how Trump would and must be outraged at how a staffer/speech writer on his campaign let his wife down, embarrassed her on a global stage. That person would immediately be fired. I thought to myself at the time: what campaign have they been watching? There’s nothing we have seen about this enterprise that makes that outcome remotely likely. Far more likely: deny, deny, deny and attack, attack, attack.
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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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”