The very first evening of Donald Trump’s Republican Convention ended in pure scandal. Some startling similarities soon surfaced between Melania’s speech, which aimed to humanize her husband, and Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech. The internet pounced on Melania, who previously claimed she’d written her own speech. Surely, she had access to some expensive writers, but something went wrong along the way. Perhaps if Trump wasn’t busy preempting his own convention to talk Black Lives Matter with Bill O’Reilly, he might have taken a moment to review the speech before disaster struck. Okay, that’s a stretch.
So, Trump’s staff is enduring a bad morning, and new campaign manager Paul Manafort trucked over to CBS This Morning to defend Melania. With a straight face, he insisted, “They’re a couple of phrases. It’s basically three places in the speech and it’s fragments of words.” Then Manafort asserted, “She knew what she was doing.” He said Melania would never crib from anyone else’s speech without proper attribution. (Side note — can you imagine Melania giving a shoutout to Michelle Obama at the RNC?)
A disorganized and likely frantic Trump team also tossed up an official statement, which changes the story to say Melania did use speech writers:
“In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances took fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it a success.”
And Manafort continued to make the press rounds. He popped over to CNN’s New Day where he actually claimed that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for Melania’s possibly plagiarized speech:
“There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech. These are common words and values that she cares about her family, things like that. I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night. She knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama’s words is crazy. This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down. It’s not going to work.”
"What she did was use words that are common words" — Trump campaign chairman on Melania's #GOPConvention speech https://t.co/N9gWKQuGSy
— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) July 19, 2016
This allegation conjures up thoughts of a secret feud between Clinton and Melania, which borders on paranoia, but there’s another wrinkle. The Other Jon Favreau points out on Twitter that Sarah Hurwitz (Michelle Obama’s head speechwriter) used to work for Clinton. Does this mean Manafort blames Clinton because her former speechwriter wrote the lifted text?
https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/755270989898878976
A Twitter user suggested yet another excuse in case the Trump campaign is listening. They could use the help today.
If #Trump wants to go to Troll Level Master, he will say #MelaniaTrump watches #MorningJoe everyday and didn't realize plagiarism was bad.
— Pundit Review (@PunditReview) July 19, 2016