The Trump campaign spent most of the day trying to explain why large chunks of Melania Trump’s speech were lifted from Michelle Obama’s address to the 2008 Democratic convention.
Now, Donald Trump Jr. faces similar accusations regarding a portion of his speech. A passage on education reform, first flagged by the Daily Show’s Twitter account, appears to be lifted from a May article in the American Conservative.
Trump Jr. said: “Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet department stores run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers…”
Compare that to the article in the American Conservative by F.H. Buckley: “What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor…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.”
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 20, 2016
Trump Jr. defended Melania Trump, his step-mother, earlier in the day, blaming speechwriters.
“Those people shouldn’t have done it, or they should have cleaned it up better, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about,” he told CBS.
Update:
The author of the American Conservative article told Vox that he was also a speechwriter for Trump Jr.
Absolutely unfathomable that a speechwriter would self-plagiarize for Trump's son's speech after yesterday's debacle.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) July 20, 2016