The Trump campaign spent most of the day trying to explain why large chunks of Melania Trump’s speech were lifted from Michelle Obama’s address to the 2008 Democratic convention.
Now, Donald Trump Jr. faces similar accusations regarding a portion of his speech. A passage on education reform, first flagged by the Daily Show’s Twitter account, appears to be lifted from a May article in the American Conservative.
Trump Jr. said: “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 run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers…”
Compare that to the article in the American Conservative by F.H. Buckley: “What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor…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.”
UPDATE
It seems that Donald Jr's speechwriter just recycled lines he had used before.
Talking Points Memo reports:
The author of that article confirmed in an email to TPM late Tuesday that he served as a principal speechwriter for Trump Jr. But the incident further complicates what was an already rough news cycle for the Trump campaign....
"I was a principal speechwriter for the speech. So it's not an issue," Buckley said in an email to TPM.
F h Buckley wrote the speech and the article. So.
ReplyDeleteNo plagiarism
I don't understand how people rip off exact lines like that. How hard is it to take 2mins and change the words to say the same thing. "Education used to be a path to the middle class, now traps people in poverty." Come on...
ReplyDeleteKind of like all of Martin Luther King's speeches?
ReplyDelete"On ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s son said that “zero” speechwriters helped him compile his speech.
ReplyDelete“I wrote every single word of my speech myself,” the executive president at the Trump Organization said.
“I think sometimes when you write from the heart, and I’ll certainly deliver it from the heart, the product will be what it will be,” Trump said, before adding that regardless the speech will “be certainly sincere and full of love and full of emotion.”"
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/07/20/eric-trump-zero-speechwriters-helped-his-speech/87331576/