Melania Trump and Her Convention Speech

In her address in front of yesterday's Republican Convention in Cleveland, Donald Trump's wife Melania, a Slovenian immigrant who still expresses herself tentatively in her adopted English language, delivered a speech after being introduced onstage by her husband.  By all accounts, Melania is very likeable and presents the kind of charm that Jackie Kennedy added to JFK's presidential candidacy in 1960.  Mrs. Trump, however, possesses very little of the verbal eloquence that Jackie had...but no one really expected her to, did they?  Melania obviously did not write the speech she delivered, although she most probably did sit down with the actual writer and laid out some of the points she wanted to make.  It's also obvious to me that she was very uncomfortable being onstage giving that speech...essentially before the world...and that she nonetheless performed her role admirably.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Melania's speechwriter, who lifted almost verbatim entire passages of a speech that Michelle Obama (you know, Trump's "enemy" Barack's wife) gave eight years earlier at the Democratic Convention.  Of course, the next morning  Donald Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort called the plagiarism allegations "absurd"...what's absurd is that anyone should ever believe what this spin artist says about anything hereafter...

No reasonable person should believe that Melania Trump would herself write such a speech, copying text from a so-prominent address from the recent past.  My opinion of her as a supportive spouse to a very ambitious...even ruthless...individual hasn't changed: I wish she were a little more strong-willed about asserting her own opinions...but then again, maybe if that were that the case, the Republican Party's role model for what they consider to be presidential material probably would never have married her in the first place.  That doesn't mean that I think poorly of Melania...if anything, her gracious nature is in stark contrast to her rude and mean-spirited husband...