gracchusdixit

Melania Trump, the Donald’s third wife, was for a brief moment the star of the first night of the Republican national convention. After a raucous floor flight over the rules governing how delegates may vote (quickly suppressed by Trump and his new best friends, the Republican National Committee), after a series of speeches predictably vilifying Hillary Clinton, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, and the Black Lives Matter movement, after a ludicrous and inflammatory harangue by Rudy Giuliani, who proclaimed that, if Donald Trump isn’t elected this November, there will never be a “next election,” after all such negative nonsense, Melania Trump delivered what was widely described as a positive and uplifting speech that both humanized her husband and ended an otherwise querulous night on an inspiring note. To make it all that much better, it was hinted (how accurately, we will never know) that she had been reluctant to speak in the first place, partly out of modesty, partly out of the natural nervousness of one who isn’t accustomed to addressing thousands of people in a public place. That she overcame these purported reservations made her success all the more remarkable.

Then, in the wee hours of the morning, you-know-what hit the fan. Somebody noticed an uncanny similarity between several paragraphs in Melania Trump’s speech and one delivered by Michelle Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention which nominated her husband. The similarities—not only the same words and phrases but the same sentences delivered in the same order—were too exact to be accidental. The plagiarism was not only inescapably obvious, it was profoundly embarrassing, because the plagiarized source was none other the First Lady of the United States, married to the man Donald Trump has been demonizing for a decade.

Since this revelation occurred, Trump’s various surrogates and spokespeople have been running around in circles, trying to explain it—or explain it away. With every gyration, their tergiversations have become more contradictory and incredible. To the extent that a defining “narrative” has emerged, it is that poor Melania, supposedly so smart, so accomplished, so well-intentioned, was misled by careless speech writers or incompetent members of the Trump staff, who didn’t take the trouble to vet her speech for possible plagiarism.

Perhaps all that is true. Perhaps Melania Trump is an innocent victim. Perhaps her heart is in the right place.

It is a truism to say that no person can see into the heart or the motives of another. We can, however, see their actions; we can see how their actions comport with their words; and we can judge contradictions between the two accordingly.

In the case of Melania Trump, the contradictions are clear. Here are some of the words she (or someone) pirated from Michelle Obama:

My parents impressed on me the values that you worked hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect. They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son.

When Michelle Obama first expressed these thoughts, she not only meant them but lived up to them. She has been an exemplary First Lady. She has never treated any American with anything but respect. She has never succumbed to complaint or recrimination in the face of the awful calumnies that have been heaped upon her, her children, and her husband. She has comported herself with complete dignity, displaying against all odds “values and morals” in her daily life.

When Melania Trump, or some Trump lackey, hijacked these thoughts, they were lying. Whether Melania was herself the plagiarist does not really matter. What matters is that these words utterly contradict the life Melania Trump has chosen to live.

This Slovenian super-model decided to marry—and has remained married to— a man who was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, who has cheated and bullied his way through life, who has betrayed countless promises countless times, who respects no one and nothing but his own socio-pathetic self-regard. For her to say that such a man is “an amazing leader” is an amazing lie.

So too is Melania Trump’s invocation of the “lessons” handed down by her parents. Her father was not some self-motivated entrepreneur. He was a functionary in the communist government of Yugoslavia. This does not mean that he was an evil man; believe it or not, communists can be decent people. It does, however, eliminate any possibility of idolization. It may be possible to pity Melania Trump for the various bargains she has made throughout her life, bargains that balance truth and myth, rhetoric and reality. It is not possible to accept any of these compromises on face value.

There is, more damningly, the uncomfortable fact that somebody in Trump-World is lying. The day before her appearance at the convention, Melania Trump declared that she had written her own speech, with “very little” help from anyone else. In the hours after the plagiarism in her speech was revealed, the line from Trump-World was that a “team of speech writers” had been responsible, using only “fragments” of her own thoughts or ideas.

Which is it? Which is the truth? Which is the lie? With Donald and Melania Trump, we will never know.