The Trump Apocalypse Watch is a subjective daily estimate, using a scale of one to four horsemen, of how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering an apocalypse in which we all die.
Melania Trump stole several lines in her speech about why she likes Donald Trump from a speech Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 about why she likes Barack Obama. The Trump campaign and its associated Republican Party hacks are now trying to argue that this act of obvious plagiarism was 1) just a coincidence and 2) isn’t something anyone would care about even if it wasn’t.
Is this true? Will it blow over? On the one hand, as we’re all well aware, Trump is within three points of Hillary Clinton despite doing and saying ghastly things all the time. You could also argue (and I’ve seen a number of people doing so on Twitter) that plagiarism is kind of a hoity-toity college-snob thing to worry about. Do Real Folks in the Heartland care that someone copied a few lines of a speech?
On the other hand, this isn’t a Trump surrogate lifting a few lines about, say, Affordable Care Act repeal from another Republican’s previous remarks. This is a member of Trump’s family copying lines about hard work and integrity from the campaign of a president who Trump regularly derides as incompetent and/or a Muslim double agent. As Brian Beutler at the New Republic puts it articulately here:
[The copied lines] 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.
As always, this opinion is worth the $0.00 you paid for it, but I don’t think that sloppily copying an Obama convention speech in egregious and ironic fashion (and then lying about it) is going to help convince voters that Trump is an effective manager, has good judgment, or is honest and trustworthy—all areas in which majorities of voters already view him suspiciously. I think this is the kind of meme-y screwup that sticks to a candidate because it confirms things that many people already believe about him. I’m lowering the danger level!
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
