They have opened themselves up to pretty much declaring Melania Trump as being a liar, no matter which way they go.
Firstly, she had initially advised that she had written the speech herself,
with very little outside help and I believe she said this before she gave that speech at the Convention:
Mrs. Trump told NBC News in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday morning that her words Monday night would be her own.
'I wrote it, with as little help as possible,' she said aboard the Boeing 757 jet that reporters and Secret Service Agents already call 'Trump Force One.'
She told NBC's Matt Lauer that she wasn't nervous about delivering a speech in her most public moment to date.
'I read once over it, and that's all,' she said.
Queue being caught stealing someone else's work and the narrative begins to change.
It goes from Mrs Trump writing her own speech with very little help from others to
something completely different:
“In writing 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,” Miller said in a statement. “Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.”
You can just see the shifty eyes as they immediately now attempt to set up the narrative that a team of writers wrote the speech, and not Mrs Trump, despite the fact that she said outright that she had written it, "with little help as possible".
So we have gone from Melania Trump having written it, to a "team of writers". Ooookay then.
That was the first statement from Trump's campaign in response to the initial horror of her plagiarism.
Then came Chris Christie, who probably still in the hope of getting something out of setting his own campaign on fire,
came out defending her:
Matt Lauer: You’re a former prosecutor, could you make a case for plagiarism?
Christie: Not when 93% of the speech is completely different …
Goddess..
What's a little theft, right?
Because this hasn't become enough of a freak show, because Trump's own campaign openly declaring Melania Trump is a liar by now saying that she did not in fact write the speech herself as she says and that instead, a "team of writers" wrote it for her is not enough,
Trump's campaign manager then enters the fray:
But Tuesday morning on CNN’s “New Day,” Manafort categorically denied that Melania Trump’s speech had been lifted in any way from remarks by Obama or anyone else.
“I thought Melania Trump hit it out of the park when she talked about her love of family, the feeling of an immigrant that comes to this country and succeeds,” Manafort said. “And I thought that the feeling she has towards her husband and her depiction of the real Donald Trump came through loud and clear.”
“There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These are common words and values that she cares about her family, things like that,” he continued when asked by anchor Chris Cuomo about the plagiarism allegations. “I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night. She knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy. This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down. It's not going to work.”
When all else fails, just fall back onto safe territory and blame Hillary and hope no one notices. And deny everything else.. Common words indeed. Especially when they are used in the exact same way, word for word in some places, as previously spoken by someone else and claimed as one's own.
And then, the narrative changed again, because you know,
it isn't bad enough already:
In a separate interview on "CBS This Morning," Manafort said the similarities between the two speeches were limited to just three sections and "fragments of words." He said Melania Trump's speech was the highlight of the convention thus far for him and complained that the themes expressed in both speeches "are not words that are unique words that belong to the Obamas."
Asked by anchor Gayle King if Donald Trump would fire anybody as a result of the plagiarism allegations, Manafort replied, “I don’t think Donald Trump feels there’s anything to fire someone for.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus offered a different opinion at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast Tuesday morning, where he said he would "probably" fire Melania Trump's speech writer if the decision was his to make. But he also praised her speech as "very inspirational" and said he didn't blame her for hitting on "pretty common types of themes."
To recap..
- We have gone from Melania Trump saying she wrote the speech herself with very little help from others.
- Melania Trump then plagiarises, proving she did not write the speech herself because she stole a portion of it from someone else.
- Trump campaign responds and now declares that Melania Trump is a liar and that she worked with a whole team of speech writers who took her experiences and wrote the speech for her, "including fragments of her own thinking" (aka what she's pilfered from others), while attempting to deny and ignore the plagiarism itself.
- Chris Christie, enters the fray and advises that only 7% of her speech is plagiarised, and that this is apparently not really a bad thing, despite all evidence to the contrary.
- Trump's camp doubles down on, denies plagiarism despite all evidence to the contrary. Tries to use "common words and values" excuse.
- Trump's camp then decides this isn't going to work, advises that "the similarities between the two speeches were limited to just three sections and "fragments of words"".. Again tries to use the 'common words' excuse to little effect. Despite previously trying to argue that there was no plagiarism.
- RNC Chairman also virtually refers to Melania as a liar, by declaring that her speech writer should be fired, despite Melania having said that she wrote the speech.
The irony of this whole thing?
She plagiarised a passage about honesty, integrity and hard work.
Can it get
much worse than that?
That's kind of like a musician trying to evade copyright law using the common note defense. It wasn't a copyright infringement because all the notes I used are commonly used notes. It's laughable. It's preposterous, but unfortunately, this stuff plays in Republicans circles. That's why they do it. And Republicans wonder why people think they are dumb. 
