There are stories going around claiming that Melania Trump plagiarized a good chunk of her speech last night from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama. Nothing could be further from the truth! Here’s a complete transcript of Melania’s speech — see for yourself!
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! The Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago.
Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Reader, I married him.
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got. I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block. I ain’t no hollaback girl. Ich bein ein Berliner. I like turtles. I love lamp.
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
And in conclusion, it’s people — soylent green is people! Use the force, Luke.
Only you can prevent forest fires.
Inspiring and original words from the wife of a man who will never be President of the United States!
H/T — Inspiration from the #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes hashtag on Twitter. I found the pic above in a tweet from @Jenny_from_ThaD.
The crazier this gets, the more I want to believe it’s an elaborate troll.
But then I read Schwartz’s New Yorker piece about writing The Art of the Deal, and that narrative falls apart.
I never thought I’d be doing this, but I have to say, along with P. Z. Myers, it was almost certainly not her fault. Like him, I teach college, mostly freshmen, and you see a certain amount of plagiarism. Melania Trump is not a native English speaker, so someone wrote that speech for her, or with her, who does speak English as a native tongue. That person, or someone else in the campaign should have caught the plagiarism and fixed it. This looks to me as though the writer was given Michelle Obama’s speech as a model and followed it too closely. This could have been accidental or deliberate. But someone else should have caught it. No way, as Myers points out, that other people didn’t hear her practising it, or read it for grammar and quality before last night. This was either laziness on the part of the speech editing staff, or arrogance.
It was a stupid thing to do (not that this will affect Trump’s fans, he’s said and done worse things than Melania ever could), but I am bothered by fake quotes prescribed to her. OK, some are obviously fake, like the Monty Python or the J.Lo one, but some might with time still circle around as something she really said. I don’t like that sort of thing, even if it’s Trump’s wife on the receiving end. Aren’t we supposed to be better than this?
It’s not an elaborate troll,
What we’re seeing is the end result of a party that spent forty years demonizing intelligence, kindness, dealing in racism and insisting that government is the enemy while running to lead the government.
Nixon started it, Reagan perfected the poison and now hopefully we can witness a Whig like collapse among the Republicans before they run Jared Fogle as the 2020 election candidate.
Melania has repeatedly asserted that she wrote that speech herself.
@Ælfscýne
Er, you do know that’s not the actual text of her speech, yes?
The problem is that large segments of her speech were lifted word for word from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Convention speech.
@ Iseult The Idle
I know it isn’t her text, that’s my whole point. If her own lines were quoted back at her, that’s fine. But people are making them up and while some (Monty Python, James Brown …) are obvious, not all people know The Big Lebowski, for example, and that quote does sound like something a person from Trump’s camp might say (except perhaps for the Dude part).
Sure now it’s a Twitter trend so everyone knows it’s a joke, but in time, who knows, some less familiar ones might stick as if they were really here quotes. It’s the internet after all.
Like fake feminist quotes and the like.
It makes me feel uncomfortable, that’s all. No offence meant.
@Iseult : his point is that people in the future looking at that won’t alway be able to tell it’s actually satirical. Because it’s a form of satire who can be understood *only* if the memory of the triggering event is fresh.
@Bonelady, it most definitely isn’t her fault and it would have been very easy for the Trump campaign to have put their hands up, symbolically thrown a speechwriter under the bus and moved on; secure in the knowlege that the incident will be quickly replaced in the news cycle but whatever happens today.
But they didn’t and every time they double-down and try to pretend this is someone else’s fault they just show their naivety at operating in the real world when people are actually paying attention.
As is usually the case with things it’s not the actual mistake that causes the damage – it’s the screw-up and lies that come trying to pretend it didn’t happen or that someone else is at fault that are the problem.
Doubling down seems to be a trait of the Trumps, but if they demand accountability from everyone else, they should start by admitting their own mistakes.
Perhaps Melania read Michelle’s speech and was inspired. Admit that, then.
Paul Manafort is blaming HRC, saying:
@Dan
Please be right, I hope that the civil war between the narrativist evangelicals and corporatist republicans ends with an end to them, so that we can have a more left leaning government, and maybe less inclined to plutocratic tendencies.
http://i.imgur.com/Fm2OFZn.jpg
I feel very bad for her today :C I mean, she’s married to a horrible guy, and I don’t know how much her opinions match her husbands’, but regarldess of all of that – this wasn’t her fault, for the reasons above. She’s not a politician, she doesn’t give speeches, though I’d like to say that she delivered it very well!
They should be going after Trump’s writers and others in the campaign responsible for editing their message. But no, there’s an attractive foreign woman to ridicule. So now every damn news site in the world is making fun of her.
Thanks, media. You’re making me feel sorry for a Trump! I don’t want to feel that!
@Scildfreja
100% agreed.
My major objection to Melania’s speech is that it’s diverting attention from Rudolph Guiliani’s yelling and screaming.
Well, yeah. I can’t think of any punishment worse than being married to Donald Trump. She seems like a trooper.
I don’t think Trump supporters will care if his sections of wife’s speech were plagiarised – they love the idea of sticking it to the establishment (you know, all those moralizing wet blankets who think passing off others’ work as your own is wrong). The more crap he gets away with, the louder they cheer. But it’s just kind of an own goal to plagiarize from your ideological opponent.
I second not holding Melania entirely responsible for this fiasco. It’s no secret that public figures use speech writers, for guidance at the very least, (apart from Trump of course who just gets up and lets out a stream of consciousness). Several people must have messed up to let this go through and it shows up how sloppy Trump’s campaign is.
I don’t think Melania ever imagined she would a potential first lady, I would not want to be in her shoes right now.
Plagiarising political speeches is pretty common. It wouldn’t surprise me if it goes back to antiquity.
Churchill had a bit of a tendency. It was General Fairfax in the civil war who originally said “Never before in human conflict have so many owed so much to so few”
Of course, the fact that Churchill prologued his speech with “never before in the history of human conflict…” might have been a sneaky tongue in cheek acknowledgment of that.
I am stuck by the irony of how Melania is accused of copying Michelle Obama, an woman that the Right has relentlessly mocked and riducled and compared to an chimp and impiled she was an transgender and an man in drag. An particular mean cartoon compared the two and the artist draw Michelle Obama very mascline and Melania very feminine with the caption “make the First Lady great again”
Like most of you I’m pretty sure that the speech was written by speechwriters, and they’re responsible for the plagiarism. But Melania claimed she wrote it (mostly) herself.
So either she needs to accept responsibity for the plagiarism, or she needs to admit that she was lying about writing the speech herself.
Right now she’s going along with the Trump campaign’s bold plan to pretend there was no plagiarism.
Even though she almost certainly isn’t responsible for the plagiarism she’s no angel here.
@Ælfscýne — All the fake Melania quotes are being posted in what it obviously a joke hashtag. No one reading those tweets thinks any of them were actually said by her.
And I’m pretty sure no one thinks my post is an actual transcript of her speech.
My biggest concern is not that she plagiarized from Michelle Obama, but that she plagiarized from Rick Astley.
‘Jenny From the Block’ woulda floored me were I not already lying down
Steve King says only white people did anything good for civilization. Melania plagiarizes Michelle Obama. Staff run around removing signs for ‘white elevators’. Scott fuckin Baio. There hasn’t been a higher number and concentration of disgruntled white dudes in one place since the Klan marched on DC in 28. I just wish this felt as funny as it sounds
I hadn’t heard about the white elevators.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/07/18/gop-raises-eyebrows-with-white-elevators-signs-in-cleveland/
IS THIS REAL LIFE
If you use one of the ‘Red’ elevators do they throw you out for being a socialist?