Manafort’s attack on Kasich, the quashing of both anti-Trump and pro-procedural reform delegates, and the borrowed Michelle Obama lines in Melania Trump’s speech: Yesterday saw quite a bit of political incompetence from the Trump/RNC alliance, as I discuss over at Bloomberg. The handling of the controversy over the plagiarism is continuing that pattern. Someone in the campaign could have just said that there was an unfortunate copy-and-paste mistake and efforts are being made to run a tighter ship. There would still have been some ridicule directed their way, but the story would have died. Instead there were laughable attempts to deny that there was any plagiarism, reports of campaign infighting over who should take the fall, and RNC idiocy about My Little Pony.

Does it matter? Yes, I think, a little bit. It is much harder to run an administration than a presidential campaign. A presidential candidate who runs a competent campaign is not guaranteed to run a competent administration, but not running a competent campaign seems like a pretty big warning sign.