On Tuesday night, not long after a CNN pundit said he’d just delivered the greatest political speech in history and might one day be president, Donald Trump Jr. got swept up in a new family tradition. Update your scorecards: two nights of the Republican convention, two accusations of plagiarism in speeches delivered by Trump family members.
Here are those excerpts in non-tweet form.
Donald Trump Jr.: “Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet-era department stories that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers.”
The American Conservative: “What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the system’s entrenched interests: the teachers’ unions and the higher-education professoriate. 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.”*
I’m on record saying that the plagiarism in the speech Melania Trump delivered Monday night is a legitimate news story, one that reveals the dysfunction and incompetence of the Trump campaign.
What Donald Trump Jr. did is nothing. This, by contrast, is a fake gotcha, a lame attempt at point-scoring that either misunderstands or willfully misrepresents the conventions of political speechwriting.
Melania Trump’s speech copied, word for word, statements that Michelle Obama gave about her own upbringing. That’s misleading, and it’s willful theft. It’s not that far off from what Joe Biden did in 1988, when he stole details from another politician’s life story. Biden quit the presidential race in large part due to that transgression. It’s a big deal.
Trump’s son’s speech borrowed language from an article. A Republican borrowing language from an American Conservative piece is something akin to a bear shitting in the woods. Donald Trump Jr.’s behavior on Tuesday night was positively Reagan-esque. There’s even a reference to Soviet-era department stores! The Gipper’s speeches were peppered with unattributed anecdotes culled from the conservative media. Taking material from friendly publications isn’t OK if you’re, say, a professional journalist. If you’re a political speechwriter, this is what you do on your Monday afternoons.
But wait, it gets much lamer. Late on Tuesday night, F.H. Buckley—the writer of the American Conservative piece—confirmed that this was a double nothingburger with extra cheese.
So, that’s what Donald Trump Jr.’s “plagiarism” boils down to: a speechwriter re-using his own material.
Bad, bad job Daily Show.
*Correction, July 20, 2016: This post originally misstated the source of a passage in Donald Trump Jr.’s speech. It was The American Conservative, not National Review.
