Cleveland has been captivated by all the ramifications of hosting the Republican National Convention. Few people can remember way back to 1936 which was the last time that the city played host. A memorable opening night on the 19th had pomp and circumstance mixed in with a surprise or two. During the festivities, there was one event that got the search engines and social media sites into high gear. Quickly people came to the realization that there was a striking similarity of the speech that Melania Trump was giving to one that Michelle Obama spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
One of the key differences that the Republican Party tries to emphasize with undecided voters is that they are the champions of family values. What this exactly means is up in the air as few if any try to concretely define this in the political arena. The general consensus is that adultery is not one of these traits. Yet this was how a perspective first lady opened up on the podium. She unabashedly admitted in front of the world that she was dating Donald Trump a year before he divorced his second wife. This got the radars pinging nationally so that when the key moments of her speech were uttered, people were on full alert for what she attempted to pass off as her own.
Verbatim is a seldom used word associated with speeches because even if ideas and intentions are the same, a simple shuffling of the words is usually enough to deter accusations of plagiarism So why on one of the biggest stages in the United States on Monday did Melania Trump try to pass off the speech as her own? The fervor over her using the current First Lady’s words is that they are her exact ones. Not a phrase or key part but wholesale sentences without even trying to cloak this theft. This was not even putting a bow on a new present. It was a blatant attempt to take what was successful in the past from another party and pass it off as one’s own work.
The following was part of what the two shared in their speeches eight years apart. “…you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect.” This was just not a common phrase to open or close a speech. It was an exhort on personal feelings about the American work ethic and how people are supposed to strive for personal interaction. The only difference in this was the accents in which these words were uttered. All over the Internet, people came quickly to thebconclusion that parts of Melania Trump’s speech were lifted from the President’s wife eight years ago.