For more than a day, Democrats have been laughing at poor Melania Trump after an out-of-work reporter noticed one passage from her Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention sounded a little familiar.
On Wednesday, the campaign of her husband, The Donald, released to reporters the letter Meredith McIver, the Trump Organization (note: not Trump campaign) staffer who wrote the speech, penned to describe what had happened.
McIver admitted to plagiarizing the speech, but wrote that it was unintentional:
"In working with Melania Trump on her recent First Lady Speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people. A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama. Over the phone, she read me passages from Mrs. Obama's speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became part of the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama's speeches. This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant."
The letter continued, indicating McIver tendered her resignation Tuesday, but Donald Trump would not accept it, and called it an oversight.
She must not be a big math person, or she would know: always check your work.
The whole debacle, our RNC trenches colleague Frank Lewis points out, is another indicator of how, um, unorthodox the Trump campaign is (this profile of Trump campaign communications director Hope Hicks is really just a story about how unusual the campaign is).
After all, in any other campaign, someone well-versed in political speechwriting would have been putting together that speech. Had such a colossal fuck-up occurred, that person would not be on staff anymore, resignation or otherwise — especially in Trumpland, given the endearing catchphrase from that show he did (assuming McIver's letter is, indeed, an accurate account of what really went down… the jury's still out on that, given the 24-hour spin-fest that ensued following Monday's discovery).
Yet there's another question that comes up in a totally different vein: who gives a shit?
The left laughed at Melania Trump's expense and created meme after meme poking fun at her for lifting a short passage of her speech from Mrs. Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. To them, it was further proof she's a vapid trophy wife and another emblem of Trump's lifelong vanity campaign, which culminates with him winning the Oval Office (even if that wasn't his original intent last summer).
But most of us don't know much, if anything, about Melania Trump. She may be shy. We don't know. But what we do know is that she's not the one who would have access to the nuclear codes if her husband was elected.
Gaffes are gaffes, after all; perhaps we need to shed our partisanship for a minute or two, have a laugh and move on.
If the gaffe wasn't an accidental display of deep-seated bigotry or of some other consequence, or if whatever flaw the gaffe exposed was admitted to and remedied, maybe it shouldn't be a big deal, especially when those who are most critical would probably be quick to defend a fuck-up of similar proportions from someone on their side of the political spectrum.
This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.