Days after Melania Trump plagiarized parts of her speech from first lady Michelle Obama, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman still can’t grasp why owning up to mistakes and telling the truth is important.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort Wednesday morning why he wouldn’t admit to the obvious plagiarism.
“You don’t want to acknowledge it because that’s the way this campaign works,” Cuomo said. “Which leads into the second problem, which is that when faced with something that you did wrong, you just deny it, no matter if it’s true or not.”
Cuomo described a series of the Trump campaign’s obvious lies. There was the time the GOP presidential nominee mocked a New York Times reporter for a physical disability, then denied ever even knowing him. More recently, Trump tweeted a photo of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton beside a symbol that resembled the Star of David. The text inside the star read “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” The Trump campaign claimed the image was actually a “sheriff’s star” but neglected to mention that white supremacists created the meme.
“There’s a pattern of denying the obvious,” Cuomo said. “What happens when you’re running the government of the United States and you don’t want to deal with what happens then? That’s the concern, that’s why I don’t understand why you won’t just own this little thing and move on.”
Manafort shot back with a jumbled string of words.
“The pattern that I see is a pattern of the media not being prepared to look at what’s really going on in America, look at what’s really happening with the Trump campaign, look at what really is being tapped into, and looking at why it’s working,” he said.
Manafort suggested Cuomo and the rest of the media “move on” from getting the Trump campaign to admit the obvious mistake.
“But I can’t move on, because you keep lying about it, so I can’t move on from it,” Cuomo replied. “Because I have to talk about what is true. Did a portion of the language of that speech come from Michelle Obama’s speech, yes or no?”
Manafort said “similar words” were used, but the “feelings of those words and commonality of those words do not create a situation where we feel we have to agree with you.”
Welcome to the end times.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
Before You Go
