Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stands with his wife Melania after she delivered a speech on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo : Getty Images/Alex Wong)
Melania Trump failed badly at her speech that she would have otherwise wanted to be perfect. It was one of the most important speeches of her life, yet she could not make an attempt to make sure that it was not plagiarized.
The wife of the Republican party candidate for next presidential elections, Donald Trump, gave her speech during the Republican National Convention on July 18, Monday night. However, the speech left a majority of people in a state of déjà vu, thinking that they have heard the exact same lines before.
According to The Washington Post, Donald had asked two high-powered speechwriters, John McConnell and Matthew Scully to write a speech that introduces Melania. The duo had also prepared George W. Bush's speech in the past, which he delivered to the nation on Sept. 11, 2001.
McConnell and Scully had sent Ms. Trump a draft of the speech in June for final approval. However, a month had passed and they did not hear about the draft. Apparently, Melania had decided to write her own version as she must have been uncomfortable with the text that the duo had prepared. She cut off a major chuck of the draft version and decided to retain just a few lines from the original text.
What followed next was a moment of sheer embarrassment and the resulting uproar. Melania made a speech that was a word-by-word repetition of theme and phrases from Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic convention in 2008. Melania's introduction was anticipated to be a high point of the entire convention, however, it attracted a lot of ridicule from both the Democrats and the Republicans.
The speeches are shockingly similar, which is quite evident from the plagiarism report posted by the Mashable. A comparison made by a plagiarism checker called Small SEO Tools reveals that more than half of Melania's speech was derived from what Obama said in 2008.
The first half of the speech was 47 percent plagiarized, while the second past was 44 percent exact repetitions of Obama's speech. Melania's longest match, which could hardly be a coincidence, was around 23 words long.
The two original speechwriters - Scully and McConnell - were shocked to see how drastically their speech had been modified by Ms Trump. It has still not clear who had the final hand at approving the speech before the ultimate showdown or who reviewed the final version of the speech before it was delivered in front of more than 23 million viewers.
The following video shows Melania's full speech at the RNC:
