A day that should have been the triumphant culmination of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the top of the Republican Party was rocked by allegations that his wife, Melania Trump, plagiarized portions of her convention speech Monday night from the remarks Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic convention.
GOP lawmakers and operatives seemed to agree Tuesday that somebody within the Trump campaign should lose their job over the decision to crib a lengthy passage from the first lady’s eight-year-old speech.
“Whoever did the first draft, that person should go,” Barry Bennett, a former Trump adviser, told MSNBC Tuesday. “I think it’s inexcusable.”
Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, told CNN that current campaign chair Paul Manafort should resign if he was the last person to look over Melania Trump’s speech before she delivered it.
The Trump campaign itself was unrepentant, with Manafort and spokeswoman Katrina Pierson offering a series of explanations as the second day of the Republican convention in Cleveland wore on.
Pierson suggested the error stemmed in part from Melania Trump’s difficulty speaking English while Manafort attempted to pin the backlash on an underhanded effort executed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, even tried to highlight similarities between Melania Trump’s words and a catch phrase popular with a character from the children’s franchise “My Little Pony.”
And Gov. Chris Christie, a loyal surrogate for the campaign, noted during an appearance on CNN that 93 percent of the speech was original writing.
“There’s no way Melania Trump was plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech,” Christie argued.
But the plagiarism allegations continued to dominate the GOP convention just hours before Sen. Jeff Sessions was set to issue the formal nomination of Donald Trump for president, a moment that should have been a high point for the presumptive nominee.
Instead, Donald Trump is reportedly fuming over the media’s response to his wife’s speech. His staff has been forced to spend most of Tuesday fielding questions about how such an important moment at the outset of the convention could have been handled with so little care.
The otherwise smooth succession of speakers who took the stage on the first night of the convention laid out a powerful argument against Clinton and the Obama administration’s failure to tame the rise of terrorism around the world. That message, billed as “Make America Safe Again,” was seemingly lost in the uproar over Melania Trump’s speech.
Although Pierson said Tuesday that Melania Trump had written the controversial address with the help of campaign staffers, she refused to specify who had contributed to a mistake that quickly became a major distraction for the Trump team.
Lawmakers scheduled to speak on the second night of the convention include House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Gov. Chris Christie.
