You Nailed It!

Shouldn’t I?  I do.  I feel sorry for Trump’s wife.  What’s her name?  I wanted to write Ivana but I knew that was a few wives back.  (The New York Post had a late eighties headline when they were divorced:  “Ivana Better Deal!” that incorrectly steers my recall.)  The front page of the Wall St. Journal is still cached on my computer.  It’s Melania:  Melania Trump.  Amidst the shambolic convention that her husband is hosting, or renting, she took the stage, and by all real-time accounts she was a measure of humanity, and immigrant humility amidst an otherwise  inflammatory war-hoop.

Say what you will about the candidate, it’s gotta be a bummer slot for just about any wife.  I can recall being repulsed by Mitt Romney but still feeling an empathic surge for his wife, when she stood up and did what she had to. Ditto for Laura Bush. And I’ve lived twenty years somewhere else.  God help you if you need to stand up and sway an entire nation in a non-native tongue.  And she did what she had to.  She didn’t drop the ball.   She humanized her husband. 

Her husband wrote “The Art of the Deal” which propelled his career.  The gent who ghosted it has now come out to say how sorry he is for his authorship of so much mendacious and, of late, influential nonsense.  Donald of course maintains that he wrote it.  “It’s my book.”  And with his double-speak default means of communicating with himself and the world, no one is the least bit surprised, that Donald didn’t write it, while he maintains that he did. 

Melania offered that she had worked hard on the speech and she almost certainly practiced the delivery over and over.  But that’s different from writing.  And in this day and age we’re all empowered to fact check things in real-time:  Someone between jobs, who should be hired by the New York Times, had a hunch that he’d heard part of Melania’s speech before.  He had.  And, alas, notable portions of her heartfelt tale were lifted directly from Michelle Obama’s convention speech from a few years back. 

Trump’s campaign isn’t well managed.  Someone had told her it was “all-systems-go” and she found out the hard way that it wasn’t.   Someone will be fired.  And the Grand-Old-Meat Eaters won’t care or hold it against her husband.  But what a colossally deflating moment it must have been for her after she collapsed in her dressing room, savoring the twenty-fifth high-five moment, with texts flying in, to say:  “You nailed it Melania!  You nailed it!” . . . to learn that you’d been humiliated, used unprofessionally and are now, forever double-branded as a plagiarist who most assuredly did not author her own plagiarism.