(no subject)
Watching the shitstorm that is the Republican National Convention I have a singular observation about the entirety of the Trump campaign.
You get what you pay for.
There is a reason so much of politics is governed by conventional wisdom. We've had 228 years of a political system in place. Every election we tweak the norms a bit, sometimes more than other. But it's an unbroken line of people getting elected mostly by doing most of the things everyone else has done, perhaps peppering in an innovative idea or two.
The Trump campaign core ideology is that none of that matters. And we're seeing it does, in fact, matter.
The two most important Trump surrogates in the opening days of the convention were his wife and son. Bill and Chelsea Clinton will be speaking at the Democratic National Convention next week. I'm figuring the people involved in writing those speeches are pulling in high six figures for their work (which will certainly include more than merely the convention speeches).
Donald Trump loaned his wife not a political speech writer, but his executive assistant to help her with a speech.
I don't know who F.H. Buckley is (to be fair, speech writers operate out of the public spotlight), but he was so bereft of ideas he inserted language he'd previously published into Donald Trump Jr's speech. The problem isn't plagiarism. The problem is shoddy craftsmanship. A competent speech writer would never reuse his own published language in the most important speech his client has ever made.
And what's worse, is in the case of F.H. Buckley, the Trump campaign probably did pay top dollar. Trump is notoriously incapable of understanding the difference between expensive and quality.
You get what you pay for.
There is a reason so much of politics is governed by conventional wisdom. We've had 228 years of a political system in place. Every election we tweak the norms a bit, sometimes more than other. But it's an unbroken line of people getting elected mostly by doing most of the things everyone else has done, perhaps peppering in an innovative idea or two.
The Trump campaign core ideology is that none of that matters. And we're seeing it does, in fact, matter.
The two most important Trump surrogates in the opening days of the convention were his wife and son. Bill and Chelsea Clinton will be speaking at the Democratic National Convention next week. I'm figuring the people involved in writing those speeches are pulling in high six figures for their work (which will certainly include more than merely the convention speeches).
Donald Trump loaned his wife not a political speech writer, but his executive assistant to help her with a speech.
I don't know who F.H. Buckley is (to be fair, speech writers operate out of the public spotlight), but he was so bereft of ideas he inserted language he'd previously published into Donald Trump Jr's speech. The problem isn't plagiarism. The problem is shoddy craftsmanship. A competent speech writer would never reuse his own published language in the most important speech his client has ever made.
And what's worse, is in the case of F.H. Buckley, the Trump campaign probably did pay top dollar. Trump is notoriously incapable of understanding the difference between expensive and quality.