The second day of the Republican National Convention will forever be known as the day of the rumor. The talk of the morning was the Melania Trump plagiarism scandal, who said what? Who did what? who wrote the speech, did Mrs. Trump add those words, was it the speech-writer, and of course, does anyone really care. That was followed by who do you think is going to get fired for the mistake? As it turns out—probably no one.
Melania Trump’s use of 70 words/three passages of Michelle Obama’s convention speech was not as big of a deal as the leftist media suggests, but a bigger deal than the Trump spokespeople say. The truth is that it was an unforced error that distracted from what otherwise would have been a great opening salvo. Or to put it another way, the Trump campaign never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Tuesday night’s speakers proved to be better than the previous evenings, they were more content driven than the first night’s emotional affair. But before the speeches was the roll call vote.
You ever notice that when a state’s chairman gives his vote count, he begins with the history of that particular state? Something like:
Mr. Chairman, The proud state Kansas, The Sunflower State, home of the 15x world champion Cardinals. The state that gave rise to the aviation business, known for its cows and sheep, is proud to cast its ballots for…
Like who really cares. All that does take a 20-minute process and make it go for an hour and a half. If they are going to go through that nonsense they should at least make it entertaining:
“Mr. Chairman, the Island of Guam, that US congressman Hank Johnson predicted would tip over if too many marines were stationed on one side of….
Or
Mr. Chairman, the great state of Ohio, home of the Cleveland Clinic’s Bed Wetting treatment center, who has produced more children who haven’t graduated high school than any other state in the union, whose governor is the first state chief executive not to attend his own party’s convention in his own state, casts its votes for…
Also strange was when Corey Lewandowski, fired Trump campaign manager announced the vote count from his home state of New Hampshire. Lewandowski announced his states vote flawlessly however, he didn’t curse out or punch out a woman (his normal procedure).
But eventually the time came and Trump’s oldest son, Donald J Trump, Jr. surrounded by all his siblings announced the vote to put his dad over the top.
Soon after the roll call and the celebration the second night of speeches began, and just like the night before one person stood out more than any of the other speakers, Donald J Trump Jr.
Before Junior was the speakers included amongst others; Speaker Paul Ryan, who urged the party to unify behind the Trump/Pence ticket, Senator Mitch McConnell was greeted with a chorus of boos, and the youngest sister Tiffany Trump.
Tiffany’s speech was all about what a wonderful father Donald Trump is, but sadly she began by saying she was nervous. The problem is I have heard thousands of speakers beginning a speech by say they were nervous so obviously that was plagiarized (just joking folks).
Also speaking last night was Chris Christie, who unlike his speech in 2012 actually found a way to speak about someone other than Chris Christie. The New Jersey Governor took a prosecutorial approach to hit Hillary Clinton hard, VERY hard. First he laid out the evidence then he asked the jury (the audience) for their verdicts:
As to Hillary Clinton, putting herself ahead of America guilty or not guilty? Hillary Clinton, lying to the American people about her selfish, awful judgment guilty or not guilty? Time after time the facts, and just the facts, lead you to the same verdict both around the world and at home.
In Libya and Nigeria guilty.
In China and Syria guilty.
In Iran and Russia and Cuba guilty.
And here at home on risking America’s secrets to keep her own and lying to cover it all upguilty. Her focus group tested persona, with no genuineness to be found, is a sham meant to obscure all the facts and leave you able to vote for her. We cannot promote someone to Commander-in-Chief who has made the world a more violent and dangerous place with every bad judgment she has made.
We cannot make the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States someone who has risked America’s secrets and lied about this to Congress and the American people.
We didn’t disqualify Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States the facts of her life and career disqualifies her. We in this hall agree with all of this.
Of course not everyone enjoyed Christie’s approach:
Chris Matthews said of the speech that, “bloodthirsty” Republican delegates are ready to “kill” Hillary Clinton. The MSNBC journalist was unhappy at GOP convention attendees for chanting, “lock her up.” Talking to Jonathan Capehart, he haltingly ranted, “And I get the feeling, he [Chris Christie] wanted — if they had said, ‘kill her now,’ it was almost that bloodthirsty.”
Referencing “sword and sandals” movies such as Gladiator, Matthews made a thumbs down sign and added, “The audience always as requested, responded always with the verdict of guilty. And they said it in a blood curdling way every time.”
Matthews objections proved the Christie speech was effective.
Donald J. Trump Jr. followed Christie and his was the best presentation of the evening. His focus was different than most of the other speakers, instead of concentrating on why the Hillary was bad, Junior’s focus was on what made his father better.
An interesting development arose out of Trump Jr’s speech, another accusation of plagiarism, except this time the media got the charge shoved back into its face.
A passage in the speech about education reform, was flagged by Daily Show’s Twitter account, because it appeared to be lifted from a May article in the American Conservative.
Junior said,”
Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet department stores run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers…”
An article in American Conservative by F.H. Buckley read,
”What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor…Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers.”
The Daily Show was both correct and stupid at the same time. There was a reason the passages were similar, F.H. Buckley wrote Junior’s speech:
Oops! Sometimes when you look for something you will find it but it’s not how it appears.
Below is the text of Trump Jr’s speech and a video of his presentation.
Good evening. I’m Donald Trump Jr. Thank you. I’m the father of five young children, from two-year-old Chloe to Kai who just turned nine. I’m the husband to Vanessa, an amazing wife and mother, and the son of a great man. I’m an American, and tonight I want to talk to you about the country we live in; the country our children will grow up in. To my generation, this is the most important election of our lifetime, one that will determine the future of our country and, in turn, the future of the world.
For too long, our country has ignored its problems, punting them down the road for future generations to deal with. In business, I was trained by my father to make the tough investments and decisions today to ensure a better future for tomorrow. We’ve actually started to believe that solving our great problems is an impossible task, and that’s why we need to elect a man who has a track record of accomplishing the impossible.
For the first time, parents no longer think that their kids will be as well of as we were. We’ve lost the confidence in our leaders and the faith in our institutions. But remember one thing: we’re still Americans, we’re still one country, and we’re going to get it all back. We’re going to get it back better than ever before. I know we’ll get it back because I know my father.
I know we’ll get it back because I know my father. I know that when people tell him it can’t be done that guarantees that he gets it done. I know that when someone tells him that something is impossible, that’s what triggers him into action.
When people told him it was impossible for a boy from Queens to go to Manhattan and take on developers in the big city, rather than give up he changed the skyline of New York.
I’ve seen it time and time again, that look in his eyes when someone says it can’t be done. I saw that look a little over a year ago when he was told he couldn’t possibly succeed in politics. Yes, he did.
For my father, impossible is just the starting point. That’s how he approaches business projects, that’s how he approaches life, whether it’s teaching his granddaughter how to swing a golf club, or tackling the toughest negotiations, he’s always fully committed.
That’s why the person who had never run for office before stood on the stage 11 months ago in this very arena with 16 professional politicians and this week that same man will stand before you as our party’s nominee for the president of the United States of America.
As a proud son and family member, it was one of the great honors of my life to be able to put him over the top in the delegate count earlier today.
His unrelenting determination is why he’s going to become our next president and why I know that when my father says he can fix the country he means it.
You want to know what kind of president he’ll be? Let me tell you how he ran his businesses, and I know because I was there with him by his side on job sites, in conference rooms from the time I could walk.
He didn’t hide out behind some desk in an executive suite, he spent his career with regular Americans. He hung out with the guys on construction sites pouring concrete and hanging sheetrock. He listened to them and he valued their opinions as much and often more than the guys from Harvard and Wharton locked away in offices away from the real work.
He’s recognized the talent and the drive that all Americans have. He’s promoted people based on their character, their street smarts and their work ethic, not simply paper or credentials. To this day, many of the top executives in our company are individuals that started out in positions that were blue collar, but he saw something in them and he pushed them to succeed.
His true gift as a leader is that he sees the potential in people that they don’t even see in themselves…
…the potential that other executives would overlook because their resumes don’t include the names of fancy colleges and degrees.
I know he values those workers and those qualities in people because those are the individuals he had my siblings and me work under when we started out. That he would trust his own children’s formative years to these men and women says all you need to know about Donald Trump.
We didn’t learn from MBAs, we learned from people who had doctorates in common sense.
Guys like Vinnie Stellio, who taught us how to drive heavy equipment, operate tractors and chainsaws, who worked his way through the ranks to become a trusted adviser of my father. It’s why we’re the only children of billionaires as comfortable in a D10 Caterpillar as we are in our own cars.
My father knew that those were the guys and gals that would teach us the dignity of hard work from a very young age. He knows that at that heart of the American dream is the idea that whoever we are, wherever we’re from we can get ahead, where everyone can prosper together.
The other party also tells us they believe in the American dream, they say we should worry about economic inequality and immobility. You know what? They’re right. But they don’t tell you that it was their policies that caused the problem and it was their policies that have no accountability.
They gave us the worst immigration system in the world, one that imports immobility, one that drives down employment and wages for Hispanic Americans, for African Americans and for everyone, an immigration system that favors illegals over those trying to go through the process legally and, at times, even over law-abiding citizens.
It was Bernie Sanders himself who warned that a large tide of new workers keeps wages low and poverty high.
The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options. Growing up, my siblings and I we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don’t have. We want all Americans to have those same opportunities.
Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class, now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students. You know why other countries do better on K through 12? They let parents choose where to send their own children to school. That’s called competition. It’s called the free market. And it’s what the other party fears.
They fear it because they’re more concerned about protecting the jobs of tenured teachers than serving the students in desperate need of a good education.
They want to run everything top-down from Washington. They tell us they’re the experts and they know what’s best.
The other party gave us a regulatory state on steroids. Dodd- Frank was a thousand pages long and it’s already spun off 22,000 pages in regulations.
Imagine trying to digest all that before you even open your doors for business. That doesn’t help consumers. What it does is destroy small business in favor of big businesses who can afford the vast number of lawyers and accountants needed to comply. Dodd-Frank is consumer protection for billionaires.
We’ve produced the thickest network of patronage and influence of any country at any time in world history. It’s composed of a self- satisfied people at the top, our new aristocrats. We can’t live that way any longer, it’s too risky.
Let me talk a little bit about risks. The other party is the party of risk. I’ve spent time with many great Americans who have served this country in the military, and they know what’s at stake. When we have weak leaders in positions of power, Americans risking their lives for our freedoms are less safe.
You know, almost daily I get a call or a text from a real American hero. His name is Mark Geist and I’m proud to call him a friend.
Mark was part of the security team at the annex on our grounds at the consulate in Benghazi. Mark was one of the men who received frantic phone calls from his buddies at the compound, calls that pleaded for help, calls that he and his team tried to answer. But calls didn’t save all his friends because Secretary Clinton’s State Department had ignored their requests for help, both on the night in question and even in the weeks and months leading up to the attack.
It was a tragedy and one that would be repeated were she to win the election. Ask Mark who’s fit to lead, who has the judgment to lead, who will take that call at 3:00 in the morning? Or better yet, ask yourselves, if you were in Mark’s shoes that night, who would you rather call?
Let me tell you something about risk. If Hillary Clinton were elected, she’d be the first president who couldn’t pass a basic background check. It’s incredible.
Hillary Clinton is a risk Americans can’t afford to take. She says she’ll issue executive orders to take away Americans’ guns. She wants to appoint judges who will abolish the Second Amendment.
Just look at how effective those laws have been in inner-city Chicago, a city with the toughest gun laws in our nation, where 70 people were murdered last month alone and where over 3,400 American lives have been lost since this administration took office in 2009.
You know why those laws fail? Because criminals by definition don’t follow laws. Rather than prosecuting real criminals, she would strip hardworking, law-abiding citizens of their rights to protect themselves and their families. She’ll throw every possible obstacle in the path of safe, reliable, affordable energy produced in America, by Americans, for American businesses and families. Rather than being energy independent, our country will be forced to remain beholden to her buddies in the Middle East.
Those are risks we can’t afford to take. And when we win, we’re not going to have to.
There’s so much work to do. We will not accept the current state of our country because it’s too hard to change. That’s not the America I know. We’re going to unleash the creative spirit and energy of all Americans. We’re going to make our schools the best in the world for every single American of every single ethnicity and background.
We’re going to put Americans first, all Americans, not a special class of crony elites at the top of the heap.
We’re going to elect a president who will work with everyone to pass legislation that will make our country great again, a president who will give us a tax code that will free the American economy and end special loopholes for the wealthy, a president who will give us an immigration law that protects American citizens and gives them jobs, a president who will repeal and replace “Obamacare” without leaving our most vulnerable citizens without health care and who will do it without destroying Medicare for seniors, as Hillary Clinton has proposed.
A president who knows we can’t simply delete our problems, but that we have to tackle them head on. A president who won’t allow PC culture to put the safety and well-being of our children and our loved ones at stake. A president who won’t bow and pander to nations that shudder at the very thought of America’s existence. A president more concerned with the safety and comfort of his fellow Americans than the feelings of those hostile nations abroad who, if given the option, would wipe America off the face of this earth.
A president not beholden to special interests, foreign and domestic, and one who funded his entire primary run out of his own pocket just to prove it. A president who will secure and defend the borders of the United States and who will appoint judges who believe that freedom requires a limited government. A president who won’t use the highest office in the land as a path to personal enrichment.
A president who’s actually created real jobs, who has actually signed the front of a paycheck, and who doesn’t just talk about it in theory. A president who has real people’s families and livelihoods dependent on his success and the success of his company for decades.
A president who speaks his mind, and not just when it behooves him to do so, who doesn’t have to run a focus group or use data analytics to be able to form a simple opinion. Who says what needs to be said and not just what you want to hear. A president who will unleash the greatness in our nation and in all of us, who will give the hardworking men and women who have built this great country a voice once again.
That president can only be my mentor, my best friend, my father, Donald Trump.
And when we elect him, we’ll have done all that. We’ll have made America great again, greater than ever before.
Thank you, and God bless.
