Melania is the victim here. I hope we all don't join her.
Donald Trump, the Great Manager, is an utter incompetent when it comes to running a presidential campaign. And he refuses to listen to those who know what they are talking about. This does not bode well for his stewardship of the country if, despite his global ignorance, by some diabolical miracle he should be elected. Incompetence and egomania are not a combination apt to produce success.
There is fundraising organization for far-Left, female feminist candidates called EMILY's List. "EMILY" stands for "Early Money Is Like Yeast (it makes the dough rise). That's a proverb in politics. The pump needs priming; EMILY's List starts the cash flow for left-wing extremist pro-abort female politicians. This priming of the pump is axiomatically something you do as early as possible- before you even announce your candidacy. Candidates who know what they are doing are angling for sources of money sometimes years before they run.
But not Donald Trump. Trump has bragged throughout the primaries that he was self-funding his campaign. This, he assured his gullible supporters, meant that he wasn't beholden to anyone (that it also meant that he wasn't accountable to anyone didn't seem to register with them).
Well, now he's broke and having to prime that pump in the middle of the convention that's nominating him for president.
Being an egomaniac who is certain that he knows it all and refuses to listen to those who really know what they are talking about has gotten him in deep doo-doo in another way. He is openly contemptuous of the idea that campaign organizations win elections. He is convinced that it's all the personal charisma of the candidate. As a result, he has practically no staff. This is a point in the campaign when offices in the states, counties, and towns where presidential elections are actually won should be well on the way to being staffed. But Trump doesn't see the need for them. He is certain that the "ground game" doesn't matter, and that his charisma will carry the day.
And he's wrong. It's hard to say exactly how much that particular bit of hubris is going to cripple him on Election Day, but it will probably cost him more votes than the margin of victory in several modern presidential elections. In fact, that (together with my residual confidence in the common sense of the American people) is one of the reasons why I'm fairly confident that no matter what the polls say he's going to lose to Hillary, and probably by a substantial margin. It doesn't matter how many voters support you if they don't get to the polls.
But hiring staff costs money. There's a vicious cycle going on here, all traceable to Donald Trump's hubris.
Which brings us to Melania's misadventure last night. The Donald- depending, as egomaniacs tend to, on his own genius- has failed to hire much in the way of a knowledgeable, competent, professional staff. Some doofus wrote Melania's speech for her- some amateur so incredibly naive that he didn't realize Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech would be instantly detected the moment the words left Melania's mouth.
The smart thing for Trump to have done would have been to explain what had happened, figured out who the speechwriter was, and fired him or her as quickly and as publicly as possible.
That's what a campaign manager who knew what he was doing would have done. But The Donald doesn't know what he's doing. Like his opponent in the Fall election and the present occupant of the Oval Office, Donald Trump is so accustomed to lying that it's his default reaction when he gets into trouble. He lies even when he doesn't have to. And in this case, he decided to lie even though the smart thing would have been to have told the truth as promptly as possible.
The bottom line is that poor Melania is the victim here- the victim of her husband's incompetence and ego. This incident should not reflect badly on Melania. But it jolly well should reflect badly on Donald Trump.
The takeaway from this incident is that Donald Trump- who runs on his supposed genius as a manager- either isn't a very good one or is simply in over his head. A good manager knows what he doesn't know, and finds somebody who does. In fact, Trump has repeatedly bragged that that is exactly how he does things- that he knows how to recruit the best people and delegate responsibility to them.
That is exactly what a good manager does. But the bottom line is that Donald Trump has utterly failed to do that with his own campaign. Instead, he's failed to hire a staff that could advise him on how to run a presidential campaign and ignored the professional advice he did have access to in favor of his own half-baked, egotistical, and historically absurd hero theory of national elections. Melania was humiliated before the entire nation because he hadn't hired a competent professional to write her speech. And barring a miracle, he has dug himself a hole it's too late to get out of by continuing to insist that the ground game doesn't matter and that the nation will simply be irresistibly drawn to the splendor of his awesomeness come November 8.
When a job candidate's resume makes so much of his possession of a specific skill- something the candidate is so good at that a wise personnel manager would be dazzled by it and overlook a multitude of drawbacks because of it- any chance he has of getting the job depends on his presenting evidence of actually having that skill, and in the awesome degree he claims.
Despite Donald Trump's self-promotion as a manager, he inherited his money. He ran several businesses into the ground. He was a successful real estate tycoon, though his ethics were not always the best and his efforts to branch out into other fields have consistently failed. And he's been a total and abysmal failure as a strategist and manager of his own political campaign.
He has ridden a wave of hate and anger and frustration to the job interview, but showshe absolutely no evidence of being a competent manager, much less the hot-shot he claims to be. If anything his presidential campaign has made him appear completely inept.
Melania shouldn't be blamed for the plagiarism incident. Trump should be. And it's eloquent evidence of why we shouldn't hire him in November.
He can't live up to his resume. And thankfully, I'm confident that it's going to cost him any chance of getting the job.
Image by DonkeyHotey
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