"In working with Melania Trump on her recent First Lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people," Trump staffer Meredith McIver said. "A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama. Over the phone, she read me some passages from Mrs. Obama's speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant."

Fair enough. Honest mistake. Except that for the past day and a half, this wasn't presented as an honest mistake or anything close to it; it was presented as no mistake, period.

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The Trump campaign and its allies argued or strongly suggested, against all reason, that the huge similarities between the two speeches were basically pure coincidence. They made ridiculous arguments that strained the rules of logic and often contradicted other comments from Trump allies and even the campaign itself.

And now all of those arguments have been shown to be what they are. Whether through dishonesty or rank amateurism, these were the arguments of people without a political leg to stand on — but who somehow failed to realize it and pressed on anyway.

A sampling of the worst offenses:

You can parse each and every one of these statements to look for gray areas and wiggle room. Perhaps Melania Trump didn't personally plagiarize anything, for example. But then you have the comments suggesting the similarities between the speeches are total happenstance — something that has incontrovertibly now been disproved.

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The entire picture is of a campaign that sought to utterly deny that anything at all untoward happened with Melania Trump's speech. The very charitable interpretation would be that it didn't do its homework. But the idea that it didn't talk to McIver about her drafting process even as these questions were being raised is totally unthinkable.