As the Donald Trump campaign dismissed criticism Tuesday, local experts weighed in on accusations that Melania Trump plagiarized passages from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama at the Republican National Convention on Monday.
During her speech on the first night of the convention, Melania Trump talked about the values she said her parents had instilled in her — “that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.”
“We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow,” Melania Trump said. “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.”
Observers were quick to notice the passages sounded similar to the speech Michelle Obama made at the 2008 Democratic National Convention where her husband, Barack Obama, was nominated for president.
Michelle Obama said, “Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children — and all children in this nation — to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.”
Elizabeth K. Markovits, an associate professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, said Tuesday that the speech represented a “great irony,” because Trump touched on hard work and integrity in the passages that were seemingly written by someone else.
Markovits said she believes the speech was plagiarized, and referred to Turnitin.com — a website professors often use to scan documents for plagiarism. The website analyzed Trump’s speech Tuesday and released a report that stated 6 percent of her 10-minute speech was plagiarized from Obama’s 2008 speech, and the probability of a coincidence was “less than one in a trillion.”
In an academic setting, a first instance of plagiarism can be used as a teaching moment for students who do not understand how to correctly cite and attribute information, Markovits said. On a second offense, a student may receive a failing grade for the course or be put on academic probation.
But in a presidential campaign, there is less room for forgiveness, Markovits explained.
“We have to expect more. This is a big job, to be part of the administration for the president. Clearly she has a role to play if Trump is elected,” she said.
According to Markovits, the speech represents Donald “Trump’s sense of shamelessness” and disarray in the Republican Party. She said news of the plagiarized speech may impact voter turnout, making GOP supporters who dislike the candidate more likely to stay home on voting day.
Markovits has discussed truth in politics with colleagues, and said the Trump campaign’s dismissal of the similarity between the speeches indicates that the truth has been lost.
“The speech had to have been taken from the other speech … If we can’t agree on that, how can we address the issues facing us?” Markovits said.
“It’s not that people believe the wrong thing, it’s that they begin to believe nothing,” Markovits said. “We become so cynical. There’s a disregard for ethics … where the factual truth doesn’t really matter.”
University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Ralph Whitehead, whose area of expertise includes the press and politics and media criticism, said he believes the speech has caused Trump some damage, partly because it took his campaign off-message on the first evening of the convention.
“The mainstream political press doesn’t like Trump, and he returns the compliment. Any miscue by the Trump campaign is going to be seized on,” Whitehead said. “This error by the Trump campaign has limited its ability to tell the country what it meant to tell the country on the first day of the convention.”
Whitehead said the misstep represented both good luck and bad luck for the campaign.
“The bad luck is that it was plagiarized,” Whitehead said. “The good luck is that it came from the candidate’s spouse in a relatively unimportant part of the speech.”
In a statement Tuesday, the Trump campaign said that no staff would be fired as a result of the similarities in the speeches, leading Whitehead to question the legitimacy of the campaign.
“If Donald Trump is unwilling to fire a 24-year-old speechwriter, then I’m concerned about his ability to deal with China,” Whitehead said.
Dave Anderson, a spokesman for the Speakeasy Toastmasters group, which meets in Hadley twice a month, said it is not unusual for someone writing a speech to draw inspiration from other speeches or watch video clips of people speaking on YouTube. But that’s no excuse for plagiarism, which often stems from laziness, he said.
“There’s always another way to say things,” Anderson said, adding that the words are not the most important part in speech-making.
“What you talk about is almost irrelevant,” Anderson explained. “What is vital in speech-making is conveying your personality, appearing poised and holding the attention of the audience.”
On a local level, Anderson said, Toastmasters warns against plagiarism but does not do much to police it. When the organization holds competitions that could reach the national level, however, speech-makers are careful to avoid plagiarism because it could result in embarrassment and disqualification.
Anderson said he does not expect the speech to have a large impact on Trump’s campaign.
“She was there because she is related to Trump, not because people care about what she has to say … she was there as a cheerleader, in a way,” he said.
Reporting by the Associated Press was used in this story.