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Donald Trump Jr. Speechwriter Cribbed Himself

Social media erupted for the second consecutive night of the Republican National Convention with claims that a Trump plagiarized part of their speech.

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The phrases in question in Trump’s speech came during a criticism of the state of America’s schools.

But Trump Jr.’s issue is different from Melania’s. “So there’s not a problem”.

But a tweet from “The Daily Show” shortly after the speakers for the night wrapped up pointed out two sentences in Trump’s speech that appeared essentially verbatim in a May column by conservative writer Frank Buckley in “The American Conservative”.

“I was a speechwriter for this speech”. The passages in both Trump’s speech and Buckley’s writing compare American schools to Soviet-era department stores run for the benefit of the clerks, not the customers.

He told Business Insider later that “I was a speechwriter for this speech”.

Tuesday night, Donald Trump’s spokesman tweeted that the campaign saw no issue with the speech and blamed the Hillary Clinton team for raising the accusations – although there was no evidence to link Clinton to the controversy. The article was titled “Trump vs the New Class”. In this case, at least, it looks like Buckley was just so fond of his own previously-echoed sentiments that he thought he’d use them again.

Did Melania Trump plagiarize Michelle Obama?

And, ultimately, self-plagiarism – that is, reusing your own words in another work without attribution – is still plagiarism, though as The Washington Post noted, this softer form is “a bit of an ethical gray area”.

So the words were re-recycled?

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Donald Jr., by contrast, seemed eager to delve into some of the finer policy points of his father’s platform.

The Trump Campaign and The Theft of Reason