Here We Go Again: Language In Trump Jr.’s RNC Speech Recycled From Article

Donald Trump, Jr., son of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, lifts his fist after speaking during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/J. S... Donald Trump, Jr., son of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, lifts his fist after speaking during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) MORE LESS
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Donald Trump Jr. appears to have followed in his stepmother Melania Trump’s footsteps and gave a prime-time Republican National Convention speech that lifted some language from a magazine article.

The author of that article confirmed in an email to TPM late Tuesday that he served as a principal speechwriter for Trump Jr. But the incident further complicates what was an already rough news cycle for the Trump campaign.

“The Daily Show” first pointed out that a few lines from Trump Jr.’s speech on night two of the convention closely matched a passage from a piece written by F. H. Buckley and published in The American Conservative in May.

Read Trump Jr.’s remarks below:

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 stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and administrators and not the students.

And here is the paragraph from the original American Conservative piece:

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.

Soon after the Daily Show tweet made the rounds, the original American Conservative article’s writer tweeted that it wasn’t stealing:

“I was a principal speechwriter for the speech. So it’s not an issue,” Buckley said in an email to TPM.

This post has been updated.

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Notable Replies

  1. I suspect there’s only one speechwriter working for all of the Trump family speakers, tied to a desk in a sweatshop in China, and with so many speeches to prepare, all they have time to do is copy and paste.

  2. Avatar for rb639 rb639 says:

    Well, at least he stole the text from a member of the same team (or so it appears).

  3. The most troubling thing is that after Melania Trump plagiarism the night before no one bothered to Google all the speeches that were to come. Making a mistake is one thing. Not being able to learn from that mistake is a whole other level of incompetence.

  4. Well now this is just trolling. You don’t think this is intentional at this point? Very much in the style. You will see lifted content in every speech from now on.

  5. If they are going to steal I think they should steal better stuff!

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