On Monday night, Melania Trump delivered her keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, which is currently going on in Cleveland, Ohio, on its opening night, and she made international headlines in a matter of minutes. Not because the potential First Lady delivered such a scintillating speech, however. No, that wasn’t the reason. Rather, it was because significant portions of her speech were unequivocally taken, verbatim, from Michelle Obama‘s potential First Lady speech from the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The following video clip is a deftly put together video montage of Trump and Obama delivering the same speech. Only one delivery was original.
In the 36 hours that have transpired, there has been widespread speculation about just how this might have happened. There’s little to no chance the person responsible adding those portions to the speech had no knowledge of Obama’s speech from 8 years prior, but who was that person? Was it Melania Trump? Was it a Trump staffer or speechwriter? Was it an elaborate fail by Donald himself?
Today we have some clarity about that, as Trump speechwriter Meredith McIver has taken responsibility for the plagiarized portions of Michelle’s DNC address in a brief statement, released today.
There you have it. Mrs. Trump read the Obama passages to McIver, and without plagiarism-checking, she added them to the final speech. It doesn’t appear the Trump camp is losing any sleep over the plagiarism allegations and the media fallout. In fact, the Republican Presidential nominee celebrated the speech on Twitter, claiming that it received “more publicity than any in the history of politics.”
What a wild November this will be.