Delaware Liberal

Wednesday Open Thread [7.20.16]

Delaware Dem

The New York Times on Donald Trump’s long history of lying: “As Mr. Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.”

“But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of ‘truthful hyperbole.’ Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.”

Reports are, from NBC, that two Republican contract speechwriters drafted a speech, and gave it to Melania and the campaign, and the speech she ended up delivering bared no resemblance to that speech. Paul Manafort continues to insist, as does Melania, that it was Melania that wrote the speech. If that is really true, it means two things: 1) the Trump campaign is more amateurish and incompetent than we could ever possibly imagine, and 2) Melania Trump is a liar and a plagiarist. Perhaps we should jail her immediately for theft, since that seems to be the Republican answer for everything these days.

And now there are reports this morning that Donald Trump, Jr. plagiarized in his speech last night.

Andrew Sullivan:

Today was a rather remarkable one in the degeneration of the conservative movement. The Trump convention has gotten off to a scary, shambolic, near-comic start. And Roger Ailes – whose foul propaganda helped create the toxic atmosphere in which this vulgar thug of a nominee could thrive – is about to be defenestrated, because of sexual abuse.

Imagine if Fox News changes from being a poisonous propaganda entity into a more conventional right-of-center news organization. Imagine if this neo-fascist experiment we’re now witnessing in Cleveland goes down in flames this November. Over eight long, brutal years, Obama played it on the ropes, waiting, waiting. And the over-reach now seems tangible and potentially transformative.

I can’t believe this quite yet. But I can hope. Obama has been like a poultice, bringing so much pus to the surface of American life. Trump is like some giant whitehead waiting to pop. It will be ugly but it might ensure that America can begin to move forward again.

More:

Hard to know what to add re: Melania’s plagiarized blather. If this were Veep, it would be a stretch. But it’s hard to get a better refutation of the entire racial text (subtexts are so pre-Trump) of this convention than the fact that Trump’s wife actually plagiarized Michelle Obama. Yep. She relied on the words of the unmentionable other! So delicious.

But it’s depressing to note that the big story is an incompetent embarrassment of a speech – rather than what we actually saw last night. We witnessed a national convention in which raw emotions of grieving mothers were deployed to demonize a secretary of state, in which illegal immigrants were described entirely as murderers, in which the president was described as a secret ally of this country’s enemies, deliberately destroying the American way of life. We witnessed a senior military officer lead a chant of “Lock Her Up!” when discussing Hillary Clinton’s extreme and arrogant carelessness which no prosecutor would nonetheless treat as a crime.

We heard not a single policy proposal, and not a smidgen of substance.

We saw a neo-fascist movement take over a major political party. This is slightly more pertinent than plagiarism.

Brian Beutler:

Whether Melania knew she was reading plagiarized text or not (and I think it’s quite likely she did not) it’s just devastating to see a campaign premised on the imagined notion of Obama incompetence get caught stealing from Obama’s own operation.

But the power of the images is actually much deeper. They don’t just negate something central to Trump’s appeal. They amplify one (actually more than one) of the main knocks on Trump himself: That he’s sloppy, erratic, in so many ways the opposite of the virtues he claims to embody. And, let’s not gloss over it, this is a depiction of a campaign—a campaign that nurtures white grievance and resentment—trying to profit off the work of a black woman, from an African American family that Trump and his supporters regularly belittle. The fact that the plagiarized text in question was about the value of hard work just makes matters worse. A mortifying, calamitous, self-immolating moment.

Greg Sargent:

Donald Trump is not qualified to be president. And the American people know it.

As the GOP convention gets underway in Cleveland today, three national polls released over the weekend showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump: A CNN poll putting Clinton up by 49-42; an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll putting her up by 46-41; and a Washington Post/ABC News poll putting her up by 47-43.

But buried beneath the toplines is evidence of another dynamic that gets at something important about the state of this race: While both Clinton and Trump are very unpopular, large majorities in two of these polls believe that only one of them is qualified for the presidency, and equally large majorities believe that the other one is not.

The new WaPo poll finds, for instance, that Americans say by 59-39 that Clinton is “qualified to serve as president,” but they also say by 60-37 that Trump is “not qualified to serve as president.”

The WaPo poll also finds that 59 percent of Americans say that Clinton has the “better personality and temperament to serve effectively as president,” while only 28 percent of Americans say that about Trump.

David Frum:

Ten Reasons Why Melania Trump’s Speech Will Have a Lasting Impact. Since Sunday, every journalist at this convention has been collecting examples of the Trump campaign’s failures and incompetence: the quarrel with Ohio Governor John Kasich, the absent senators and governors, the no-show donors, the convention’s financial embarrassments, the floor fight over rules, the lack of a proper schedule, and the defective apps and other technology. Suddenly, there is one easy-to-understand incident that encapsulates in one grim joke all this convention’s cavalcade of derp.

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