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:
Except it wasn’t stealing…
— Frank Buckley (@fbuckley) July 20, 2016
“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.
