Cleveland
This ought to be Donald Trump’s strength.
A modern political convention is a show—a glitzy, four-day party thrown by the nominee to elevate his brand and celebrate his greatness. Even his critics would have to concede: Nobody puts on a show and nobody celebrates himself quite as well as Donald Trump.
And yet the opening of the Republican convention being held to nominate him was, depending on your view, either a farce or a debacle. One major objective of the gathering here is to attempt to bring “relative unity” to the Republican party heading into November, as Newt Gingrich put it. In the same interview, on the first day of this would-be unity convention, Gingrich attacked the Bush family for behaving “childishly” by choosing to skip it. Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort lashed out at Ohio Governor John Kasich for “embarrassing” the state, and suggested that Kasich decided not to attend the convention in order to set himself up for another presidential run in 2020. This criticism came after Manafort boasted that forces loyal to Trump had “crushed” anti-Trump Republicans in the Rules Committee and Trump himself, in the middle of a long digression on unity while introducing his running mate, gloated about the same. Chris Christie, a veepstakes finalist and longtime Trump famulus, trashed the man who bested him as a “big mouth from Congress” and declared “what Donald needed was a partner that governed.”
At the announcement of the Republican ticket, that so-called big mouth, Indiana governor Mike Pence, spoke of his excitement at receiving the call from Trump on Wednesday. On Thursday, Trump had told Greta Van Susteren that he hadn’t made a “final, final” decision on his running mate. Even before Trump introduced Pence on Saturday, Trump insulted him, explaining that his new partner’s decision to endorse Ted Cruz on the eve of the Indiana primary was the result of his caving to “establishment” pressure. In an interview on 60 Minutes taped a short time later, Trump claimed that Pence was “misled” into voting for the Iraq War. And while Trump says that same vote was such a mistake for Hillary Clinton as to be disqualifying, he said “I don’t care” that Pence voted for the war. (Trump also used the interview to repeat his thoroughly discredited claim that he had opposed the Iraq War beforehand.)
Things didn’t improve when the convention was gaveled in. After a contentious floor fight over rules in the afternoon, the story of the night, crowding out coverage several strong speeches, was that two paragraphs of Melania Trump’s were taken, nearly verbatim, from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech. There’s no question that the passages were lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech. But a statement from the campaign after the controversy erupted avoided the issue altogether. In an appearance on CNN Tuesday morning, Manafort pretended that the similarities, including word-for-word passages, were mere coincidences.
“What she did was use words that are common words and just expect her to – to think that she would do something like that, knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night, is just really absurd,” he said.
Absurd? That’s arguably the best word to describe Manafort’s attempt to spin blatant plagiarism and maybe the best word to describe the opening of the 2016 Republican convention.
