"Unpredictability is not a strategy," and team Trump found that out in embarrassing fashion Monday night after the fiasco involving Melania Trump's speech, writes Chris Cillizza of
The Washington Post.
During what Cillizza calls "one of the three or four most important speeches of the entire convention," two of
Melania Trump's passages contained phrases that were word-for-word from Michelle Obama's speech at the Dems' convention in 2008.
Though the campaign is in full spin mode — blaming Hillary at the fore — to defend the speech, Cillizza says Donald Trump is going to be looking for a fall guy — and it's him.
"Because Trump has set the example from the top: Say stuff and figure it out. And it has worked, which only affirms the idea that he can say and do whatever and not suffer any consequences," Cillizza wrote.
Running a lean campaign is laudable, but with the understanding it's humans who work on campaigns whose job it should be to comb threw every speech, parse it avoid any semblance of plagiarism from any speech ever given, Cillizza says.
Team Trump didn't have that, and now they're forced into defense by having Chris Christie say that
93 percent of Melania's speech was her own.
"The real blame lies with Trump. This is the campaign he wanted, the campaign he prided himself on running. Zigging when everyone else zags works — until it doesn't. Unpredictability isn't a strategy," Cillizza concluded.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.