How the NY Times Helped Blame Melania Trump for Campaign’s Failure

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I just read the Times article about how Melania Trump’s speech ended up replete with plagiarisms, and it is pretty obvious that the Times was fed a full load of Trump horse shit.
 
As a matter of fact, and facts are important here, Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro claimed that they had spoken to more than dozen people “involved in and close to” the Trump campaign, but their story only quoted two such individuals, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, neither of whom were quoted about how the speech got mangled the way it did.
 
Haberman and Barbaro report that the original speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, never saw the speech again after they delivered their draft, and only became aware of the discrepancies when they heard the speech live. They were not, however, actually quoted in the story.
 
All of the remaining comments about the speech were gleaned from conversations with likes of Romney speechwriter Stuart Stevens, Matt Latimer, who wrote speeches for George W. Bush, and Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, all of whom focused their remarks on the subject of how bad it was that this happened, and how it could have – and should have – been avoided.
 
But speechwriters all know that you’re only as good as the speaker you are writing speeches for.
 
The Trumps – all of them – are a bunch of very rich, very self-centered, self-important people who have been trained to think very highly of themselves and very little about anyone else. As the saying goes, “Their shit don’t stink.”
 
However, it is pretty obvious that the Trump campaign – with egg all over its face because of a major security blunder – is throwing Melania to the wolves and blaming her for screwing up a perfectly good speech by tinkering with it..and they are using the New York Times to do it.
 
Trump hates the New York Times, so why are Trump’s people talking to the New York Times, rather than Trump favorite, The National Enquirer?
 
There are two probable reasons: people believe the New York Times and the Enquirer isn’t a daily newspaper….yet.
 
Note that no one spoke on the record, a sure sign that the reporter was being handled, not fed facts. In fact, the only facts in the article were the identities of the original speechwriters and one other speech writer who may also have been consulted.
 
Let’s give Melania the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say she knows how to use the software required to insert a document into a teleprompter. (That may in fact be overly generous because a teleprompter script has to be formatted specifically for that function.)
 
Do you see her uploading her own speech with no one else the wiser about the changes she had made?
 
Okay, let’s say you can believe that one. How about this one: didn’t she rehearse the speech with anyone?
 
An important speech gets rehearsed multiple times by different people. It is read TO the speaker by a professional announcer, so the speaker can hear how the speech is supposed to sound. This is especially important if the speaker isn’t a native English speaker. Then, the speaker reads the speech to a group of people in a focus room. And it goes on from there, often several times as the speech is refined and rehearsed.
 
Either that did not happen, or none of the people involved in the rehearsal and editing of the speech had ever heard Michelle Obama’s speech or, if they had heard it, they didn’t remember it.
 
This is highly unlikely because, when you sit down to write a historically important speech, the first thing you do is review speeches made by other speakers on similar occasions, so the original speechwriters were undoubtedly aware of Ms. Obama’s 2008 blockbuster speech…but they were obviously cut out of the process after they delivered their version of the speech. It is equally obvious that no one else engaged in the vetting process either knew the text of Michelle Obama’s speech, or had the basic common sense to run Melania’s speech through plagiarism checker.
 
That was an obvious blunder, having nothing to do with Melania Trump and everything to do with the way the Trump campaign is being mismanaged. It just gets worse from there because there are only three possible conclusions to be drawn from this episode:
 
1. The Trump campaign is so deficient in its data management protocols that they can’t be trusted with America’s secrets. (This is important because, as an anointed candidate, Trump now has access to security briefings similar to those given to the President.)
2. The campaign wanted to set up Melania to distract the media from the numerous deficiencies in the management of the convention itself, including widespread dissension in the ranks of the Republican party. In other words, this was a deliberate, deniable attempt to distract attention from Trump’s performance at the convention.
3. Trump’s campaign staff didn’t think that Melania Trump’s speech was significant enough to invest more than a modicum of time and energy.
 
And there’s the rub because, as the First Lady, Melania Trump would inevitably be privy to a great deal of highly confidential information. Allowing her to roll around like a loose cannon on the ship of state is just plain stupid.
 
Regardless of which conclusion you choose, the fact remains that Donald Trump was so little concerned with his wife’s performance that he didn’t bother to vet her speech himself, probably considering it beneath dis dignity to do so. The other alternative explanation is even less reassuring: he didn’t care what she was going to say because he thinks he’s won this thing already and therefore can say or do anything he wants.
 
That may not be the kind of president that America wants, but it may very well be the kind of president that Donald Trump wants to be.

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