CLEVELAND—Trump and his four-day infomercial are about to become laughingstocks—unless he quickly figures how to manage an enterprise far smaller and less complicated than the U.S. government.

A divisive first day of the GOP presidential convention turned to disaster late Monday night when the denizens of social media discovered that the candidate’s wife, Melania Trump, had plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech. As you can see here, large portions of the speeches overlap in a way that can’t be blamed on coincidence.

The Trump campaign, as if often does, disputed the indisputable.

“Well, there is no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech,” Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, said Tuesday. “These were common words and values and she cares about her family.”

Before the speech, campaign officials and Melania Trump herself declared the candidate’s wife the primary author. “I read it once over, and that's all,” she told NBC, “because I wrote it, with as little help as possible .”

But at 1:48 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Trump campaign issued a statement that saddled the blame on unnamed speechwriters without admitting to plagiarism: “In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations and, in some instances, included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.”