I suspect, if the speechwriters did not add this, then it is likely her husband did. He is a micromanager who tries to control everything. I doubt she takes a breath without his permission…which is why nobody will get fired, and no admissions will be made.
@HarvestMoon1 said:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/exclusive-the-trumps-speak-with-matt-lauer-727480899958
At about 1:13, she says "“I read once over it and that’s all because I wrote it with [as] little help as possible.”
Right that is what I recalled her saying . That’s not what was quoted above. And it does inform us she had some help which everyone does on these speeches.
If you say you wrote it, then you own it.
What she said was she wrote it with some help.
I’m wondering if some of the help came from one of theTrump children, and if that is perhaps behind the effort to protect the speechwriter at all costs.
I thought the same thing.
Barron writes well for a 10 year old.
Maybe he was working on copying his letters.
Tiffany came across well. My kids are that age and I cannot imagine them having the poise to speak to such a large audience.
I think I said earlier (but maybe not). It is known that his son-in-law has written a few of his speeches.
Just came out that a close family friend (Meredith Mcgyver- I’m not sure how to spell that, sorry) helped with the speech.
@pizzagirl I imagine it’s different when you’ve been in the spotlight since birth.
Not her talent - she was just in spotlight since birth. And her good looks are not her achievement either.
This is just so unfair. So rich, beautiful and well spoken. She needs to share.
Wholly apart from his politics, every time I see Donald Trump, Jr., I think of all those photos of him standing proudly next to the dead animals he’s killed. Especially the one where he’s holding a dead elephant’s severed tail. Ugh. Which is why I approve of this: https://upvoted.com/2016/01/22/redditors-photoshop-donald-trump-jr-holding-a-dead-elephants-dismembered-tail/
We don’t know yet who’s responsible for the plagiarized passages, but I’d put money on it not being a professional campaign staffer. No way would one of the professionals endanger his/her reputation and livelihood by such a blatant case of lifting the words of another famous person.
I speculate that it’s either a family friend, as RGE mentions above, or it’s Trump’s son-in-law. According to news accounts, he has done a lot of the writing for the family since Trump started using the TelePrompTer. I also noticed he was missing from the convention floor where the rest of the kids were today.
The son-in-law is a journalist / publisher, right? He’d be particularly attuned to plagiarism issues, I’d expect. I doubt it was him.
As a writer, I’ve been plagiarized. I take a lot of pride in my words. And I don’t want someone else using them unless I get credit. I find the defense that this was not plagiarism to be offensive.
As a teacher, I’ve caught plagiarism almost every class I taught. This meets my definition.
m0minmd – several pages back you said that Clinton plagiarized a speech from Reagan. I’ve googled this every which way and see no stories about this at all. What’s your source?
Melania is not being held to the same standard as a college student. But politicians have been hurt by charges of plagiarism before (Joe Biden). And it raises a lot of questions – like, why couldn’t she come up with her own words to describe the man she’s been married to for 18 years? And why use the words of a woman whose family your husband criticizes as being incompetent?
“Nobody writes their speech - not Barrack Obama, Michelle Obama, or Melania Trump. They put down basic ideas and what they want to get across. Speech writers put the stuff together to appeal to their demographic, organize it etc.”
Actually Obama is known to have written some if his own speeches. Not all the time. But sometimes. And he has a fairly heavy hand in many. . This is simply a skill that happens to be in his wheelhouse. Last night several Republican speechwriter were even talking about This and mentioned that he is the only president since Lincoln to have this high level of ability as a writer. But it’s certainly not a requirement for the job and it usually happens just how you’ve said.
See this New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/us/politics/melania-trump-convention-speech.html
. . . .
It sounds to me like it was Melania “and her staff” who put all that in, and nobody bothered to check the speech afterwards when they were done.
Obama is very much the exception to the rule on speeches. It’s a once or twice in a lifetime thing to have someone as high as Obama writing his/her own speeches. But love him or hate him, he is a spectacular orator and part of that comes from reading his own speeches (that he wrote or had a very heavy hand in editing).
I’m not comparing the two, but Hitler was also an outstanding orator. I have no idea if he wrote his own speeches or not.
It’s sad that this happened. Her delivery was quite good, and maybe she even believed some of what she said, even the plagiarized part. Whoever(s) put that part in is an idiot. I hope it wasn’t Donald himself but I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. As a result, his wife’s name will get dragged through the mud along with his.