The night after Melania Trump’s address at the Republican National Convention, which was discovered to have lifted words from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech and created a firestorm of unintended controversy, Donald Trump Jr.’s speech came under fire for similar plagiarism allegations.
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But this time, speechwriter Frank Buckley is defending the remarks, claiming it wasn’t plagiarism at all because he wrote the words in the first place and just recycled them from a column he published last May in the American Conservative.
Except it wasn’t stealing…
— Frank Buckley (@fbuckley) July 20, 2016
“I was a speechwriter for this speech,” Buckley told CBS, dismissing the Daily Show tweet that first pointed out the similarities. “So there’s not a problem.”
The explanation appears to have spared the Republican nominee from a second day of humiliation, but the incident does highlight the continued problem of effective management within Trump’s presidential campaign. Following Melania’s high-profile blunder on Monday, one would think that Trump’s aides would be scrupulous about vetting all the prime-time speeches of family members. But then maybe there’s no limit to how much blame Trump’s people can dump on Hillary Clinton.