Melania Trump plagiarizes part of Michelle Obama's 2008 speech
The Republican's wife introduces herself with a friendly speech, partially copying that of the current first lady
Melania Knauss, wife of Donald Trump and aspiring first lady of the United States, delivered on Monday night, at the Republican convention in Cleveland, a kind and positive speech, far from the negativity and the tone of the schoolyard bully of her husband.
But the good reception of Melania Trump's premiere before a millionaire audience was quickly tarnished, when it was discovered that substantial parts of the speech were a plagiarism of the speech that the current first lady, Michelle Obama, gave at the Denver Democratic convention in 2008.
So that's pretty blatant, right? pic.twitter.com/EPnHME7afV
— Mike Hearn (@mikehearn) July 19, 2016
Melania Trump celebrated that her parents had taught her "values" consisting of "working hard for what you want in life, that your word binds you and that you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect" .
"Barack and I," Michelle Obama said in 2008, "were raised with many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word binds you, and that you do what you say you are going to do, that you you treat people with respect. "
"Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them," Melania Trump said in Cleveland.
"Because we want our children, and all children in this nation, to know that the only limit to the height of your accomplishments is the scope of your dreams and your willingness to work for them," said Michelle Obama in Cleveland.
"Her integrity, compassion, and intelligence are reflected in me to this day in me and my love for family and America," Trump said of her parents.
Eight years earlier, Obama said of her mother: "Her integrity, her compassion and her intelligence are reflected in my own daughters."
In a statement, Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, justified that "when writing her beautiful speech, Melania's writing team took notes on what had inspired her life, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thought".
Inspirational or outright plagiarism, the episode took the focus off a speech that showed a clear contrast between Melania and Donald.
He is aggressive and foul-mouthed, suffering from obvious verbal incontinence. She is low-key and cautious, but when she speaks like Monday night in Cleveland, she is friendly and positive, away from the negativity and schoolyard bullying tone of her husband.
He bases her campaign on attacks on undocumented immigrants. She is a Slovenian who came to the United States as an immigrant and retains a strong Slavic accent.
If her husband wins the November presidential election, Melania Knauss will be the only foreign-born first lady since Louisa Adams, the wife of the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams. She will also be the first supermodel to hold the position. And she is an enigma. A woman reluctant to get muddy in the political arena. Not at all inclined to impersonate an ordinary citizen: she belongs to the elite and does not hide it. An immigrant married to a man, Donald Trump, who has made anti-immigrant rhetoric and the racist message one of the pillars of her political career. The wife of a man who has insulted women in the campaign, accused by his first wife of rape (later she said that she did not use the word in a criminal sense) and with a serious problem in these elections with the female vote.
Night star
Melania Knauss, the third wife of Donald Trump, was the star of the first of the four days of the Republican National Convention, the conclave that this week will consecrate Trump as a candidate of the Republican Party to the presidential elections in November. The presence of an ex-supermodel on the stand, and the suspect redacted of the speech, heightened the sense of unreality surrounding this campaign in which a businessman and television star, with no political experience, has taken over the reins of the Grand Old Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.
It was presented by Trump himself, who appeared in person before the thousands of delegates at the Quicken Loans Arena, the same one where basketball player Lebron James triumphs. It is unusual for the candidate to speak on the first night: he usually reserves for the last. But it is not unusual for him to attend the meeting before D-Day: in 2012, then-Republican hopeful Mitt Romney flew to Tampa, Florida, which was the headquarters of the convention, to witness the speech of his wife , Ann.
Melania, born in Slovenia, in the former Yugoslavia, in 1970, has been with Donald, born in 1946, for 18 years. She emigrated to New York, after living in Milan and Paris, to develop her modeling career there. She met Trump in 1998. In 2005 they were married. The wedding was attended by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Trump's Democratic rival in November. The Trumps are the parents of a 10-year-old son, Barron.
It will be difficult for Melania to connect with voters scared by Trump's macho rhetoric, but in a night of messages of anger and division, of messages that aroused resentments, she seemed to come from another world, a balm in the polarizing and tense universe of Trumpland. . Later it turned out that those words were not made in Trump, but the vilified Obama.
