President Donald Trump and his team are no strangers to claims of plagiarism and a new one started making the rounds mere hours after he was sworn-in as commander-in-chief. This one though wasn’t about words that were spoken but rather baked goods that were eaten. On Friday night, celebrity baker Duff Goldman made a thinly veiled suggestion that, hey, a cake he baked for former president Barack Obama was remarkably similar to the one that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cut at the Salute to our Armed Services Inaugural ball Friday night.
Goldman took to Twitter to post a side-by-side comparison of Trump’s inauguration cake and the one he made for then-President Obama’s 2013 inauguration. And they do bear an uncanny resemblance. “The cake on the left is the one I made for President Obama’s inauguration 4 years ago. The one on the right is Trumps. I didn’t make it,” Goldman wrote and accompanied it with the thinking face emoji.
A photo posted on the Facebook page of Charm City Cakes, one of Goldman’s bakeries, in 2013 also shows the original cake.
Goldman, who is the star of Ace of Cakes, baked the nine-tier cake for Obama’s Commander-in-Chief’s Ball. At the time, he talked about how much pressure there is when you’re baking a cake for such an important occasion. “When you’re doing a cake like this, you know that everybody is going to be looking at it,” Goldman told the Washington Post. “It’s a lot of pressure. The more recognition you get for something that you do, the greater the pressure becomes, because more people are looking for a mistake.”
If true, this would hardly be the biggest plagiarism scandal connected to Trump and his campaign. At the Republican convention, observers immediately pointed out that parts of Melania Trump’s speech had been directly lifted from one that had been delivered by Michelle Obama.
In a more recent high profile case, former Fox News analyst Monica Crowley said she would not be taking on the job of director of strategic communications at the National Security Council after reports that she had plagiarized extensive sections of her 2012 book and her Ph.D. dissertation.
Earlier in the day, Trump himself was accused of plagiarism, with many noting remarkable similarities between a portion of his inaugural address and words spoken by Batman supervillain Bane. One key passage? Trump and Bane both said they were giving power “back to you, the people.”
