CLEVELAND — The allegation that a chunk of Melania Trump’s Republican convention speech had been lifted from Michelle Obama — a charge that overshadowed much of Day 2 of the Republican convention here — almost certainly won’t change anyone’s vote.
That doesn’t mean it won’t affect the Trump campaign.
The problem for Trump and his allies is lost opportunity. The whole purpose of a modern political convention is to serve as a 96-hour-long advertisement for the nominee and party. The aim is to spend every minute of those hours pounding home a few basic messages.
Even in the best of times, Trump has little patience with that sort of discipline.
To be sure, his seemingly freewheeling, unconstrained style forms a big part of Trump’s appeal to his core constituency. But even Trump’s allies agree that his most faithful supporters, who have proved willing to stick with him through any controversy, are not numerous enough to win the general election.
At the convention, “he has to convince some of the doubters” that he “can deliver” on his promises, Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to the campaign, told reporters Tuesday.
That effort to reach out to the uncommitted is where the apparent plagiarism interferes. The issue is not that voters necessarily care about whether Melania Trump, or more likely someone working for her, lifted parts of her speech, but that the controversy got in the way of the message Donald Trump wanted — and needed — to convey.
For a brief moment, Melania Trump’s speech seemed like a clear fit with the convention’s message — a simple, human rebuttal of the image Democrats have tried to foster of her husband as an unsteady, bigoted and dangerous man. But within minutes of her conclusion, whatever benefit the campaign had reaped began to curdle.
The agent of the undoing was a recently laid-off television reporter, Jarrett Hill, who had watched the speech at a Starbucks in Culver City, Calif., and had been struck by a phrase that reminded him of Obama’s 2008 speech.
Eight years ago, he had thought the speech was “really beautifully written,” he recalled in an interview Tuesday.
“I believe I even wrote it down or typed it,” he said, “obviously having no idea that eight years later I’d hear them again from a woman who wanted to be first lady speaking at a convention in front of 40 million people.”
Hill’s tweets Monday night reporting what he had discovered spread at internet speed through the cavernous media filing center here.
The side-by-side comparison left little doubt that one passage of Trump’s speech — ironically a section dealing with honor and integrity — had been largely copied from Obama’s.
