MANSFIELD: The Coverup Is Worse Than the Crime

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part, but I really, really hope that this last Trump kerfuffle is the one that places the nail in the coffin of a failed presidential bid that never should have been. And this one just might do it.

When it was reveled — by Jarrett Hill, a brother no less — that Melania Trump had lifted (ok, plagiarized to be more accurate) entire sentences of the speech that she made at the RNC while endorsing her husband from First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the DNC, the smart thing to so would have been for Trump’s team to place the blame on a low-level staffer and say that person had been fired, and been led off to the guillotine to boot. End of story.

But no, Trump’s mindlessly arrogant team does what instead? Blame it on Hillary Clinton. Yes, you read that right; they attempted to blame it on Hillary, thus compounding the sin. These folks really don’t have one iota of shame — or smarts.

“This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, she seeks out to demean her and take her down,” said Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign advisor. “It’s not going to work against Melania Trump.” So Hillary made Melania do it? Not even diehard Trump supporters can buy that whopper.

Katrina Pierson, another spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, acknowledged that Ms. Trump used phrases similar to those used by Mrs. Obama but insisted that the language was not copied verbatim.

“Similar?” “Similar?” Whole passages were copied verbatim, word for word.

Pierson said in an interview that Melania Trump was trying to echo themes expressed publicly by prominent women including Laura Bush and Elizabeth Dole. “She really wanted to communicate to Americans in phrases they’ve heard before.”

Boy, did she ever do that! The only problem for the Trump campaign is the words came directly out of the mouth of Michelle Obama — you know, the wife of the president that really isn’t an American citizen (at least according to Trump). Melania Trump is probably right now in bed in Trump Tower, curled up in a fetal position. Will she ever go out in public again?

This is a team of clowns that just don’t know how or when to cut their losses. This could have been so easy to contain, but no, they, in typical Trump fashion, were just going to bull it through, and shovel more shit down the throats of their supporters, some of whom are now beginning to gag.

According to the New York Times, “Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who has also been an Obama adviser, argued that the controversy revealed an inability among people closest to Mr. Trump to talk about his character.

“The person who is supposed to know the candidate best and can speak to his values and what drives him couldn’t write her own speech on it,” Ms. Cutter wrote in an email. “Instead, she lifted from a first lady who spoke from the heart about her husband.”

Trump’s folks are so dumb that when John Kasich decided to boycott the RNC, instead of treating it as a non-issue, they made it a big deal, thus giving the story more legs while picking a fight with the popular sitting governor of the one state that no Republican presidential candidate has ever been elected without winning.

This kind of bumbling seriously calls into question Trump’s ability to govern if he somehow were elected. There’s an African proverb that goes, “The higher a monkey climbs up a tree, the more you can see his ass.”

Thank you, Jarrett Hill.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

 

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