Yes, Day One of the “unconventional convention” was a trainwreck.  For so many reasons.

It got fun in the late afternoon with a rules challenge by delegates opposed to Trump.  They basically wanted to say they didn’t agree with the Rules Committee, and hoped to insert certain new rules for the future, like having only closed primaries.  But the Trump forces basically steamrolled over them

Then you had Rep Steve King (R-Iowa) who appeared with a panel on MSNBC and essentially made the case for the white identity movement:

“This whole ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Mr. Hayes asked.

Mr. King responded: “Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”

Then you had Scott Baio, being, you know, Chaci and soap opera star Antonio Sabato, Jr., who later went on ABC and said he was “absolutely” sure that Obama was a Muslim.

Much of the evening was devoted to fear and stark long-debunked lies, most notable regarding Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.  The lie that there was a “stand down” order was repeated several time, even though it has been debunked by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Ugly shouts of “Lock her up!”, referring to Hillary.  William Kristol described the first night of the Republican convention in The Weekly Standard.

It was always perhaps the stupider party, the clumsier party, and the stodgier party. But it was also the sounder party, the more constitutional party, and the more responsible party. Now, Donald Trump’s Republican party is stupider than ever, but it is no longer sound or constitutional or responsible. Quite an achievement. So it was a depressing first day here at the Republican convention in Cleveland.

It was the day when it became incontrovertibly clear that a distinguished political party has fallen into the grip of a vulgar demagogue with a thuggish retinue. They will maintain that grip at least through November 8. And even if they lose, the after-effects will be substantial, and recovery and renaissance won’t be easy.

But the lowlight (in retrospect) was the speech of Melania Trump.  As it happened, it wasn’t a terrible speech.  In fact, it was just about the only speech of the night that didn’t assert false facts, and was low-level and measured, and didn’t spit at Hillary Clinton.

The biggest criticism one could make about the speech on its face was that it really didn’t say much of anything about the side of Donald Trump we don’t know.  We thought we were going to hear charming stories about Trump’s personal side, a softer side.  But none of that.

Oh, she praised him — possibly even rickrolled him, saying at one point:

He will never, ever, give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down.

Funny.  But rickroll aside, that is pretty strange coming from the man’s THIRD WIFE!

But about 20 minutes after she left the stage, people started noticing the plagiarism.  Actually, credit goes to Huffington Post blog contributor Jarrett Hill who first caught this:

That, coupled with the fact that she had told Matt Lauer earlier in the day that she had written the speech herself with as little help as possible, put the Trump camp in an interesting corner.

Would they own up to the plagiarism?  Conservative Jonah Goldberg correctly said it was about the Trump campaign’s incompetence.

This is simply grotesque political malpractice, bordering on sabotage. While I obviously think plagiarism is bad, the way the journalistic clerisy treats it as a capital offense always bothered me.

But, this isn’t some journalistic brouhaha, it’s political malpractice. Obviously, Melania Trump fibbed when she told Matt Lauer she wrote the speech herself — a fib a great many politicians and political spouses have told over the years (I know a disproportionate number of speechwriters and ghostwriters, starting with my wife). I have no doubt she worked on it to make it her own. But it doesn’t matter whether she cribbed those lines herself or whether some idiot on the Trump campaign did it. This was Melania’s introduction to the country, and she knocked it out of the park. But the homerun was called back on account of cheating. Last night the conversation was all about how great she did. That conversation is over. If ever Trump had an excuse to bust out a “You’re fired!” this is it.

The answer came this morning.  Trump campaign manager and spokesman Paul Manafort said it was just a coincidence, and that this was Hillary Clinton once again attacking women (although the Clinton campaign has not said anything about the plagiarism at all).  Specifically, he responded to the charges with this:

“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.”

Emphasis mine.  So there it is.  Melania just happened to express using the exact same words as Michelle did eight years ago – a freak accident.

But even if you don’t care about the actual plagiarism, consider this

Whether Melania knew she was reading plagiarized text or not (and I think it’s quite likely she did not) it’s just devastating to see a campaign premised on the imagined notion of Obama incompetence get caught stealing from Obama’s own operation.

But the power of the images is actually much deeper. They don’t just negate something central to Trump’s appeal. They amplify one (actually more than one) of the main knocks on Trump himself: That he’s sloppy, erratic, in so many ways the opposite of the virtues he claims to embody. And, let’s not gloss over it, this is a depiction of a campaign–a campaign that nurtures white grievance and resentment–trying to profit off the work of a black woman, from an African American family that Trump and his supporters regularly belittle. The fact that the plagiarized text in question was about the value of hard work just makes matters worse. A mortifying, calamitous, self-immolating moment.

Indeed.  And you have to wonder about the collective brains of this operation, whether it is Trump himself, or the “brilliant minds” he surrounds himself with.  They knew, or had to know, it was going to be a scrutinized speech.  Who thought they could get away with it?

And who is thinking that by denying it, they can get away with it?

This isn’t a he said/she said thing, or something hiding on an email server somewhere, where we have to take someone’s word for what happened or what was said.  Michelle’s speech is right there.  Melania’s speech is right there.  If a person can look at that and accept that it is not plagiarism, then you know that person is SWIMMING in the Koolaid.

Missing is the irony that the particular passage that Melania chose to lift makes her transgression all the more devastating. Michelle Obama spoke eloquently about working hard and treating others with respect and dignity. “Your word is your bond,” Michelle said.  And, in an extraordinary irony, Melania said the same thing, word for word.

Meanwhile, the tough NJ prosecutor Christie had this to say about it:

Matt Lauer: You’re a former prosecutor, could you make a case for plagiarism?

Christie: Not when 93% of the speech is completely different …

Right.  Teachers? If 7% if a student’s paper was copied, would you just ignore it?

As for the Trumps themselves, they’ve been silent and it is well past noon the following day. Melania’s Twitter account merely passes along the campaign’s official statement, while Donald’s Twitter account has been unusually inactive.

I close with these sage words from Richard Barry:

Donald J. Trump has run his campaign based on the premise that the truth is whatever he says it is. His attacks on the media have always been a part of this strategy, preparing the way to argue that whatever “they” say is intended to tear him down because he is in fact the only real truth-teller and, in any case, an outsider privy to a different understanding of things. If a candidate decides that lying about everything is the only way to succeed, it is necessary to attempt to discredit those who claim to specialize in fact-checking.

It’s a clever approach and has worked well so far.

Melania’s petty theft is not a huge issue for the Trump campaign, but a lot of people are laughing today at this man who takes himself oh-so-seriously. And that’s a bad day, especially when the whole world really is watching.

UPDATE… gotta add Yglesius, who takes on the plagiarism debacle for what it is – an exercise in intellectual laziness.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the course of this campaign it’s that he’s not willing to put in the time and work to make it happen. He hasn’t courted party elders, he hasn’t hashed out a policy agenda, he hasn’t built a minimally competent digital operation, and he can’t even work out his convention schedule on a reasonable timeline.

He hasn’t built the kind of professional campaign staff that could save his wife from the humiliation of making her primetime national television debut delivering a plagiarized speech.

His wife. The one who promised us he’d never let us down.

Because at the end of the day, Trump is lazy. He was too lazy to diligently rebuild his credit and his real estate empire, too lazy to get into the food business in a way that would enhance his brand rather than run it down, too lazy to develop menswear that meets his own standards, too lazy to develop a real curriculum for Trump University, and too lazy to run a real presidential campaign.

Not lazy in the sense of spending all afternoon napping — he’s clearly happy to keep up a frenetic pace of activity — but too lazy to pay attention to the boring details like “Is this a good suit?” “Is this educational program an actionable fraud?” “Does this policy idea make any sense?” or “Am I about to humiliate my wife on national television?”

To people who find Trump’s topline message unappealing — most likely the majority of Vox readers — this kind of thing may not matter. But to the millions of Americans who dolike the “divisive” aspects of Trumpism and are hoping he’ll be their champion, it’s precisely these smaller things that ought to make the difference. Is Trump on the level? Is he really out there giving it his all? Is he motivated by the same sense of duty as the war heroes he trotted out Monday night, or is he just out there having fun? Is he going to handle your interests as sloppily as he handled Melanias?

…and these points from the Atlantic (but read the whole thing) about why this is more than about plagiarism:

5) Trump has just vividly demonstrated that his campaign—never mind the campaign, he himself—have zero skill at crisis management. Confronted with this comically absurd failure, their instinct is not only to lie, shift blame, and refuse responsibility, but to do so in laughably unbelievable ways. It’s all a big joke when the crisis in question is a plagiarized speech by a would-be first lady. It won’t be so funny when a President Trump tries to manage a truly life-and-death crisis in the same blundering, dopey, and cowardly way.

6) The incident throws a harpoon into the heart of the Trump campaign’s racial politics. Trump’s message: Non-white people are ripping off hard-working white Americans who play by the rules. “They” cheat; “we” lose. Could there be a sharper reversal of that racialized complaint than Melania Trump in her designer dress stealing Michelle Obama’s heartfelt words?