On the first night of the Republican National Convention, Melania Trump got busted stealing two entire paragraphs from the speech Michelle Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. To be fair, it probably wasn’t entirely the former supermodel’s fault, since it isn’t like she wrote the speech herself. Even though she first tried to take credit for writing the speech, it was a speechwriter who holds the blame in reality.
Controversy began to stir on Tuesday when it appeared that Donald Trump Jr. had stolen part of his speech from an essay in The American Conservative.
Donald Trump Jr. said this:
Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class, now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet department stores that are run for the benefits of the clerks and not the customers for the teachers and administrators and not the students.
The article, “Trump vs the New Class,” reads:
What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the system’s entrenched interests: the teachers’ unions and the higher-education professoriate. Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers.
On heightened alert for plagiarism by the Trump’s after Melania’s speech the night before, Twitter pounced almost immediately.
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 20, 2016
And here it is off Google books: Donald Trump Jr plagiarized FH Buckley https://t.co/0qlcgHahTi pic.twitter.com/CWQWXsrC84
— Alan Yuhas (@AlanYuhas) July 20, 2016
But before long the author of the article in question, Frank Buckley, weighed in on the matter himself.
Except it wasn’t stealing…
— Frank Buckley (@fbuckley) July 20, 2016
It turns out that the borrowed sections of Trump Jr.’s speech weren’t the result of plagiarism, it was the result of a really lazy speechwriter who copied from himself.
F.H. Buckley tells @businessinsider: “I was a speechwriter for this speech. So I’m afraid there’s no issue here.”
— Brett LoGiurato (@BrettLoGiurato) July 20, 2016
Apologies. Donald Trump Jr. didn’t plagiarize. He just hired a ghostwriter to write about his own father and that ghostwriter was lazy.
— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) July 20, 2016
You’d think that with all those billions they could hire decent speechwriters, but apparently not.
Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images
