So parts of wanna-be First Lady Melania Trump’s speech at this year’s Republican National Convention appear to be lifted directly from actual First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.After my initial reaction (What the Fuck?!)—which I’m sure is the same reaction as almost everyone else in the world—it occurred to me that we shouldn’t really be surprised. It’s just another in a long line of examples in which Donald Trump has attempted to fool us. Up is down. Left is right. Old is new.Donald Trump, and his entire campaign, from top to bottom, is full of shit. Stupid, idiotic, can-you-believe-people-even-listen-to-this shit.If I think about it too much I actually feel bad for Melania Trump in the same way that I feel bad for the wife of any presidential candidate who is expected to address a national party convention. What in Melania Trump’s background suggests that she would feel comfortable giving a speech in such a forum? She’s not running for any office. She’s just married to a guy who (supposedly) wants to be president. Does anyone vote or not vote for a candidate based on their spouse?But I find it hard to sympathize with anyone whose judgment is so lacking that they decide to marry Donald Trump. And she claimed to have written the speech “with as little help as possible.” Come on. Dear Reader, if you believe that then I’ve got a really long wall on the border I want to sell you. (Or make you pay for.)*Side note: Melania, if you’re reading this, those marks that look like eyelashes in the second sentence above are called quotation marks. I used them to show that those words aren’t my own. They’re yours. (I think.)However, I’m willing to cut her a little slack because it’s difficult to think of a worse role in the world than that of Donald Trump’s wife. Like most presidential wives, she didn’t ask for this, so to judge her by a standard similar to that which we use to judge the candidates themselves just isn’t fair.Her megalomaniacal husband, on the other hand, can’t be judged harshly enough.
The Trump campaign, and Trump himself, have continually played on the fears of a certain segment of the American population, and stoked those fears into a sort of unapologetic nationalism completely devoid of substance. He promises to Make America Great Again (which is actually the same slogan that Ronald Reagan used in 1980, without the “Let’s” at the beginning; even his slogan is a ripoff!), largely by blaming our problems on those people.From his blatant lies in which he claims to have seen “thousands and thousands of people” cheering in Jersey City as the World Trade Center towers fell, to saying that “some people [have asked] for a moment of silence” for the man who shot five Dallas police officers, to tweeting a graphic that originated as racist propaganda and claims to show crime statistics by race, Trump has repeatedly shown an ignorant, idiotic, pathetic irresponsibility that we shouldn’t tolerate from the lowest member of society, never mind the presidential nominee of a major American political party.And the truly frightening aspect of Trump and his campaign is their apparent complete detachment from reality. It’s as if they’ve decided that if they repeat something often enough it becomes true, and if they deny something often enough it becomes false.So despite irrefutable evidence—some of the words are exactly the same, in the same order, without credit, that’s plagiarism!—that Melania stole parts of Michelle Obama’s speech, Trump’s campaign manager can say with a straight face that it’s “just really absurd” that Trump plagiarized the speech. And Chris Christie (has anyone had a more precipitous fall from maybe-he’s-a-presidential-contender status to good-lord-what-a-joke-that-guy-is status than Chris Christie over the past few years?) can say, “There's no way that Melania Trump was plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech.”No, Chris, what I think you intend to say is “There’s no way the Trump campaign can think they’d get away with such blatant plagiarism. They can’t think we’re that stupid.” Sorry, Chris, you’re wrong. They do think we’re that stupid.And they think that we’re that stupid because a large segment of the U.S. population has shown that we’re that stupid. More than thirteen million people have voted for Donald Trump this year. Thirteen million!That’s thirteen million people who have essentially said, “I want a man who makes fun of disabled people, thinks a Mexican judge is biased because of his ethnicity, retweets graphics containing Nazi propaganda, refused to disavow a former KKK leader’s support when first asked about it, believes that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., thinks that Ted Cruz’s father was with Lee Harvey Oswald right before he killed JFK, and thinks that Mexico sends their rapists to the U.S., to be the president of the United States.”It’s going to be hard to sympathize with a country whose judgment is so lacking that they decide to elect Donald Trump as president.I hope we show him that we’re not that stupid.Let me send you more Dry it in the Water posts!
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