Op-Ed: A political speechwriter’s take on Melania Trump’s plagiarism

I’ve always had a tender spot for people accused of plagiarism. I suspect it’s easier to plagiarize a passage inadvertently than most people think. When I write a longer piece, or sometimes even a shorter one, I might take several pages of notes, and those notes consist both of my thoughts on the subject and what others have written. An ordinary way to take notes, I assume. If you’re not diligent about placing quotation marks around passages drawn from others, though, you run the risk of mistaking one of them for your own, especially if you put the project aside for a month or two, then come back to it.

So far I haven’t gone into print with anybody else’s words. At least as far as I know.

In any case, I imagine something like that happened to Melania Trump, whose Monday night Republican convention speech bore a striking resemblance to Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic convention speech. Perhaps a speechwriter used Michelle Obama’s speech as a kind of model, then passed it around to some careless colleagues, and somewhere in the process Obama’s speech was treated as the draft itself.

It’s not as if the earlier speech was especially memorable: It sounds like typical wife-of-the-nominee boilerplate. Any aspiring first lady at any point in American history could have said the same thing, more or less, and struck the right note for the occasion.

Besides, most of the Monday night convention speeches sounded vaguely plagiarized. With only two or three exceptions, the speakers seemed unusually reliant on routine political verbiage. Their sentiments sounded borrowed, their tone tentative and self-conscious — almost as if they felt they shouldn’t be there at all.

Maybe I’m projecting. I know I would be embarrassed to stand before millions of people and pretend to believe that Donald Trump will make a fine president. (Or to write a speech for someone pretending the same.) But in a few cases, I’m sure I detected a tendency to spout a few effusive clichés and get off the stage.

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Social media lit up Monday night as some on Twitter pointed out that Melania Trump’s prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention sounded strikingly similar to Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech.

A speech by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss), for example, consisted of nothing but political platitudes from beginning to end. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a speech so unoriginal. Here are just the first few sentences:

You know there’s a reason that “Make America Great Again” has resonated with so many people this year. It’s difficult to see greatness when you’re working harder for less. It’s difficult to see greatness when Washington is picking winners and losers. It’s difficult to see greatness when you feel your voice isn’t being heard. For the past eight years, we’ve seen the economy sputter and stall. We’ve seen the president ignore the Constitution. And we’ve watched instability fester around the world. Americans deserve to see greatness again because we live in the greatest nation the world has ever known. Our nominee, Donald Trump, believes we can do better, that Americans can do better. Hillary Clinton offers four more years of the same failed and tired policies that voters rejected when Republicans won the Senate majority in 2014.

It goes on at some length, in just that way. Commonplace phrases pile on top of each other like sandbags. There’s nothing precisely wrong with the passage. Apart from the riffs about “greatness” and the names Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the passage might have been lifted from any speech at any GOP convention during any Democratic administration in the last 30 years. It was as if Wicker asked a speech-writing machine to give him the least interesting and least controversial product it could manage for the occasion.

The sheer blandness of this language may foreshadow the GOP’s fall presidential campaign. “We’re going to say these things ‘cause we have to,” Republicans seem to be telling us, “but don’t listen to anything we say, and please make it end soon.”

Barton Swaim was a speechwriter for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. He is the author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.”

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