Tuesday, July 19, 2016
CLEVELAND (AP) — After a chaotic start, Donald Trump is under pressure to steady his Republican convention as a plagiarism charge and other unforced errors threaten to overshadow GOP efforts to unify behind him.
Still, barring last minute complications, the unorthodox billionaire will end the night Tuesday as the Republican Party’s official White House nominee.
This week’s four-day convention is Trump’s highest-profile opportunity to convince voters that he’s better suited for the presidency than Democrat Hillary Clinton. But the rocky start raises fresh questions about his oversight of his campaign, which gives voters a window into how a candidate might handle the pressures of the presidency.
The plagiarism accusations center on Monday night’s well-received speech by Trump’s wife, Melania Trump. Two passages — each 30 words or longer — matched a 2008 Democratic convention address by Michelle Obama nearly word-for-word.
Trump’s campaign managed only to keep the controversy alive on Day 2 of the convention by insisting there was no evidence of plagiarism, while offering no explanation for how the strikingly similar passages wound up in Mrs. Trump’s address. The matter consumed news coverage from Cleveland, obscuring Mrs. Trump’s broader effort to show her husband’s softer side.
Democrat Hillary Clinton pounced on the tumult, saying the Republican gathering had so far been “surreal,” comparing it to the classic fantasy film “Wizard of Oz.”
“When you pull back the curtain, it was just Donald Trump with nothing to offer to the American people,” Clinton said during a speech in Las Vegas.
Top Trump adviser Paul Manafort said the matter had been “totally blown out of proportion.”
“They’re not even sentences. They’re literally phrases. I was impressed somebody did their homework to think that that could be possibly done,” Manafort told The Associated Press.