Accusations of plagiarism started flying thick and fast on Monday night soon after Melania Trump concluded her address to the Republican convention on a rapturous note.
Within no time, media outlets began vying with one another to report that at least two passages of Trump’s speech were the same nearly word-for-word as the one that First lady Michelle Obama had delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. The passages dealt with values of hard work that needed to be passed on to successive generations.
If some outlets spoke of “striking similarities” between the two speeches, some others termed it a case of direct lift from Obama’s address.
As television channels kept playing excerpts from speeches by the two women, Donald Trump’s manager Paul Manafort finally broke the campaign’s silence and sought to refute the allegations outright.
“To think that she (Melania) would do something like that knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night is just really absurd,” Manafort told CNN on Tuesday morning.
“We’re talking about words like compassion, love of family, respect. These are not words that are unique words that belong to the Obamas,” he told CBS News, maintaining: “She (Melania) knew what she was doing. And she never cribbed from another speech without acknowledging that she was quoting somebody else.”