We hold this truth to be self-evident, that Melania Trump borrowed thoughts and words from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech Monday night. ADVERTISING We hold this truth to be self-evident, that Melania Trump borrowed thoughts and words from Michelle Obama’s
We hold this truth to be self-evident, that Melania Trump borrowed thoughts and words from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech Monday night.
No, wait.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Melania Trump uttered words that sounded exactly like Michelle Obama’s words, she didn’t do her husband any favors.
Hey, did I just plagiarize the Declaration of Independence AND the opening sentence of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”?
Nope.
Those words are so famous, so cliched even, that they don’t need to be attributed because everyone knows who wrote them.
But what about lifting less famous turns of phrase?
What about what happened Monday night, after a guy named Jarrett Hill, who has a YouTube channel on home design, noticed that Melania Trump’s convention speech sounded an awful lot like the one delivered by Michelle Obama in Denver in 2008?
He noted that two passages in particular used parallel language to describe parallel thoughts.
Did Melania Trump — or her speechwriters — do something wrong? Did borrowing Obama’s words cross the line? Or was it all just an embarrassing coincidence?
Watching snippets of the two speeches side by side — and they’ve been playing everywhere all day — it’s very hard to conclude that Trump’s choice of language was simple coincidence.
Anyone can spout generalities about being raised right by upstanding parents, about wanting the best for America’s children. Those are familiar tropes in political speeches.
But when Trump used the same syntax to express thoughts that Obama used in the same context (political nominating convention, spouse of candidate introducing herself to the nation), she left herself open to charges that she had helped herself to something that wasn’t hers.
Just how bad was it?
“If there is one constant in political speech writing,” former George W. Bush White House speechwriter Elise Jordan wrote in Time, “it’s that 99 percent of speech-writing mistakes are process mistakes, not nefarious cheating.”
What Melania Trump did is not nearly as egregious as the plagiarism that helped force Joe Biden out of the 1988 presidential race. (Biden didn’t just steal Welsh Labor leader Neil Kinnock’s words, he practically purloined his life story.)
Nor is it quite as minor as then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s use of his friend Deval Patrick’s words in 2008. Patrick, the Massachusetts governor, was a friend with whom Obama swapped ideas; Patrick said he did not consider it an act of theft.
A simple acknowledgement of a mistake, and an apology, even an insincere one, would probably have tamped down the conversations that are overshadowing the second day of the Republican National Convention.
Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson had a similar take. “These are values — Republican values, by the way — of hard work, determination, family values, dedication and respect. And that’s Melania Trump. And this concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd.”
Anyway, like I always say, this political season is the best of times and the worst of times. Know what I mean?
