Amateur Hour

Give him the gong. -- Major Bowes, founder and host of the Original Amateur Hour.

   Did the professional speech writers get paid for the draft they supplied to Ivania Trump a month before the Republic National Convention?
   It turns out that the wife of the GOP nominee for President didn't like the version written by two nationally known speech writers, so she turned to a friend -- a former dancer who majored in English -- for help in rewriting the text.
   No sooner was it delivered, with an estimated 37 million people watching on national television, than a flood of criticism washed away any value the speech might have had. It was, indeed, well delivered. However, with numerous examples of phrasings and entire sentences lifted from Michelle Obama's convention speech to Democrats eight years ago in praise of her own husband, President Barack Obama, whatever value Mrs. Trump's speech might have had was immediately drowned by accusations of plagiarism.
   Now one wonders whether the two professional speech writers initially hired to draft a convention speech for Ivania actually got paid for the work they did.
   Considering Donald Trump's penchant for stiffing contractors for work done, using various excuses for not paying them, then offering to hire them for additional work, one would not be surprised if this is a Trump family tradition.
   Did they think no one would notice the borrowed passages?

   This latest episode adds to the history of Trump practices of listening to no one but himself. Now it seems this is a family practice, as the various Trumps try to control every aspect of the Republican Party.
   Time to rename it the Trump Party, and the only ones invited are members of the family.