Was Melania Trump’s Speech Plagiarized? Will it Matter?

The mainstream media was on fire Tuesday over claims that two sentences from Melania Trump’s speech Monday night at the Republican National Convention were lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech from the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Was it plagiarism? Not in an academic sense, but it’s likely there was some lifting of words and phrases from the 2008 speech into the 2016 speech. It’s certainly not something new, particularly in the world of political speech writing.

Especially among those now feigning outrage over the matter:

• President Obama, while a U.S. Senator and campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, made a speech in which phrases were nearly identical to one given by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick two years earlier. Not surprisingly, the Hillary Clinton campaign spun it into a “plagiarism scandal” that obviously had no bearing on the outcome of the presidential election that year.
• Of course, Clinton herself is no stranger to lifting quotes. She stole a quote or two from a few of her husband’s old speeches in the early stages of her failed 2008 campaign. One in particular, in which she referenced “invisible Americans,” even drew the attention of liberals at Huffington Post.

If you don’t remember either instance, don’t feel bad. That’s only because these so-called “scandals” usually don’t have long shelf-lives in the public consciousness.

But the absurdity, of course, isn’t limited to the Democratic Party. RNC spokesman Sean Spicer suggested, during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, that perhaps Mrs. Obama was the one who did the quote lifting:

“Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony said ‘This is your dream, anything you can do in your dreams you can do now.’ I mean, if we want to take a bunch of phrases and run ’em through Google and say, ‘Hey, who else has said them?’ I could come up with a list in five minutes. And that’s what this is.”

When Blitzer tried to suggest there were “stark similarities” between Mrs. Trump’s speech and Mrs. Obama’s, Spicer replied, “I just quoted Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony. She said something similar too, so did Mrs. Obama plagiarize her, too?”

The award for perhaps the most reasonable response to the whole thing came from Trump campaign adviser Sam Clovis, who more or less admitted the quotes were lifted, a mistake was made, and it was time to move on to something far more important. In an interview with MSNBC, he said:

“I’m sure what happened is the person who was helping write this plucked something in there, an unfortunate oversight and certainly Melania didn’t have anything to do with it.”