This is a huge story, and they're right that it has to be completely humiliating for Melania Trump. At minimum, it exposes her as someone who was willing to get up and give a speech about her life that was written by someone else, which wasn't obviously true to her life.
However, while everyone shouts at each other and tries to gain partisan points, let me suggest that this was a hoax. The evidence is the "Rickroll" in the middle of it.
Now as everyone knows, the "Rickroll" is an internet hoax created and popularized by 4chan pranksters. At least some members of Anonymous, which is linked to 4chan (and indeed commonly thought to have grown out of it originally) have declared war on Donald Trump, although the group's main channel has rejected the call.
Still, my guess is that some of these hackers got access to the Trump campaign's data -- through a hacked private email account, it could easily be -- and altered the speech in a way that was guaranteed to be humiliating to Ms. Trump. The "Rickroll" in the middle is a kind of signature, then, so everyone will realize how clever they were.
If I'm right in that guess, it was a devastating move. By the time anyone picks up on it, the news cycle will be over and she will have been both publicly humiliated and likely permanently damaged as a campaign asset.
13 comments:
give a speech about her life that was written by someone else
Three sentences - which were a mountain of cliches to begin with - do not make an entire speech "written by someone else".
And a candidate's wife telling people that her husband won't give up and won't let you, the voter, down - as hoary an election cliche as it is possible to imagine - also don't mean that cliche, IN THIS ONE CASE, must have been pulled from a pop song. It's not even a duplicate of the lyrics.
Bah. This does not make sense.
Allahpundit's fake excuse for it sounded pretty plausible -- 'we mapped in some text from earlier First Lady addresses to emulate in order to strike similar themes, and somehow forgot to get around to emulating it and just left the original stuff in there.'
But to me it looks intentional. You could hardly have hurt her worse than having her copy Michelle Obama, of all people. This makes the Trumps look bad compared to the Obamas, after all, a standard of comparison that will not help them with Republican voters.
You are putting WAAAAAY too much attention on this. Everybody will forget about this in a couple of days.
Damaged? Damaged in what way? She's still a hot model, compared to the walking cadaver that is Bill Clinton, and nobody thinks Hillary is pretty these days.
You're reading tea leaves here.
Maybe she aspired to more than being beautiful. Or maybe she just would have liked not to look like a thief and a fool in front of millions.
In any case, it's set the tone for how they American left will abuse her for the rest of her life. That's damage, of a sort.
It's set your tone, apparently. Hasn't set mine. She still appears a strong, successful woman who also happens to be very easy to look at.
What it looks like to me is she got sandbagged, either by hackers or, more likely by a still-amateurish campaign staff who did a sloppy job of checking her speech text. And Manafort isn't doing her any favors--Krauthammer is right about this: a prompt apology for the sloppiness, and everybody moves on.
Eric Blair is right, even with the campaign amateurishness.
Eric Hines
I am thinking mostly of Sarah Palin's destruction as a public figure by the incessant mockery she received. She was a successful governor, popular and accomplished, and smart as well. She didn't survive the daily mockery, though. She profited from it, and then retreated -- both from politics, and into self-caricature. It was, from my perspective, a very sad thing.
Was this sabotage, carelessness, or incompetence, it's given the left the grip on her it will want. I don't think this sort of commentary is going to go away, not in a few days, nor ever as along as she remains a public figure.
Well, I agree it's distressing to see that sort of attack.
On the other hand, this would have happened regardless of whether three sentences of her speech were near-copies of three sentences from Michelle Obama's speech. I've been seeing ugly references to her for six months now based on the fact that 1) she's a beautiful woman and 2) she married a wealthy man. You can probably guess what is said. Some line of attack would have been chosen and spread all over, and it would have been an ugly and personal one. She is associated with a popular Republican politician and so that was never avoidable.
And unlike Sarah Palin, she isn't a politician herself. So at least this doesn't mean the destruction of her career.
Hey, Sarah Palin was the VP candidate, not the wife of the presidential candidate. BIG honking difference.
And Palin screwed up, especially that interview with Katie Couric, which might not have been entirely Palin's fault, but still.
And McCain didn't really help out any.
And Melania's speech is not a huge story.
Wait till Trump gives his acceptance speech.
The Alternative Right will ensure she doesn't suffer nearly as much damage as Palin did.
Secondly, Trump's dynasty will also provide support, and they also have Palin, somehow, on their support team.
As it turns out, Melania liked MO and got the speech writer to fill the lines in, but the lines were not double checked so appeared too similar to MO's. There's nothing strange about Democrat families liking MO or other black Democrats. It was part of doing business in the Leftist alliance, Democrats adhered to a common code of defense and offense.
It was, from my perspective, a very sad thing.
Her family benefited, which is what should matter. The nation merely threw away a leader they didn't deserve, that is all.
Oh yea, this sounds like Trump dynasty trolling the media, whether on purpose or merely as a side effect of being aligned with the Alt Right, or as a side effect of being Democrats. They won't be former Democrats until later.
Grim, is this (or the post title) justifiable:
give a speech about her life that was written by someone else
as a description of three sentences copied almost-verbatim, in the middle of a fairly long speech?
The post title assumes that this was an intentional act of sabotage, quite possibly by an Anonymous member, in which case it is right to call it a hoax. I could be wrong about that, but it's a theory that seems plausible to me.
As for the rest -- would you give a speech about yourself that was written by somebody else? Edited, sure: it's always great to have a second pair of eyes. But written by someone else?
If she was going to speak on foreign policy (or health care, which was Hillary Clinton's favorite topic as first lady), of course you'd want the speech to be written by experts. You'd employ both researchers and a speech-writer to make sure you conveyed the research in a rhetorically appropriate way.
Granted English is not her first language (she is impressively multi-lingual). Still, hiring a speechwriter to write a speech about yourself strikes me as such an odd thing to do.
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