Campaign Mops Up Poorly After Melania Trump Speech Mess

WASHINGTON -- Well, Donald Trump can't tell his wife she's fired. Nor should he.

The evident plagiarism in Melania Trump's speech doesn't reflect poorly on Melania Trump, at least from what we know so far. Its presence, and the handling of it after its predictably swift disclosure, reflects poorly on the Trump campaign.

It demonstrates, as if more were needed, that this is an operation that is not ready for prime time.

First, let us assume for the moment that Melania Trump herself did not engage in the jaw-droppingly stupid act of cutting and pasting from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech. Candidates, and their surrogates, have speechwriters to produce first drafts, and second ones, and so on. So allow for a permissible amount of self-puffery in Melania Trump's comments to NBC News' Matt Lauer that she wrote the speech with as "little help as possible." Emphasis on the "as possible."

Which would mean that some speechwriter somehow thought that he or she could get away with the cut-and-paste job. Indeed, even if the deed had been done by Melania Trump herself, a functional campaign operation (i.e., not the Trump campaign) would have found it and deleted it -- before it was delivered before an audience of millions.

If I were Melania Trump's speechwriter, the first thing I would have done would have been to search what other prospective first ladies had said at conventions. The last thing I would have done would have been to lift, word for word, passages from anyone else.

That the campaign hired someone who would do this, or not find it, speaks volumes about the quality of its operations and its vetting. In fact, running such checks has been standard operating procedure for years; it is what competent convention operations do. Every college student is aware of the anti-plagiarism software designed to detect such activities -- and prevent this debacle.

Second, the response. You can judge a political operation not only by the mistakes it makes -- all do -- but even more by the way it mops up after them. This was a moment that called for immediate and wholesale confession of error, followed by public firing.

Except being Donald Trump means never having to say -- or, more precisely, never actually saying -- you're sorry.

So Tuesday morning, the Trump campaign non-apologized. "In her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success."

Until it wasn't -- because it was plagiarized. Hello, Earth to Trump campaign?

Then, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort outdid Monday morning's errors, when he went after "petulant" (but popular with the not entirely irrelevant voters of Ohio) Gov. John Kasich.

"There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values. She [Melania] cares about her family," Manafort said. "To think that she'd be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy." Yes, but side-by-side doesn't lie. Would some mathematician or linguist somewhere please calculate the likelihood of these exact phrases turning up by random in the same two speeches?

But Manafort wasn't content with that risible argument. He had to go further, insisting that "this is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, she tries to demean her and take her down." Hello: Please identify Clinton fingerprints at work here? Unless Clinton sent over a speechwriter, this one's on you.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus did his diligent best to explain it all away at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast Tuesday morning. "The distraction gets you off message a little bit this morning, but I think we'll get back to action this afternoon," he said. "All campaigns go through growing pains."

Sure. But not all of them are doing their learning in real time, on live television, in a presidential campaign. This is a campaign not ready for prime time. Its operatives reflect the flaws of its principal -- unprepared, undisciplined and always unrepentant.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.