Boos filled Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland Wednesday night as one-time presidential candidate Ted Cruz failed to endorse Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during his speech at the Republican National Convention.
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Meanwhile, a Trump staffer named Meredith McIver has come forward to take responsibility for inadvertantly plagiarizing Michelle Obama in the speech, casting the blame away from Melania and her husband. “No harm was meant”, McIver said in a statement. Melania’s fault, insiders said, was to borrow from a recent presumptive First Lady’s speech rather than one in time from over 200 years of a tradition of party conventions.
“I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech”, McIver wrote.
A small section of Melania Trump’s roughly 15-minute speech, a highlight of the opening day of the convention in Cleveland, was similar to Michelle Obama’s speech in support of Barack Obama, then a US senator campaigning for president.
Trump’s campaign denied the charges of plagiarism and claimed that the media and Hillary Clinton were pushing the story.
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“I wrote every single word of my speech myself”, Trump, 32, told ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday. He did give high praise to his older brother Donald Trump Jr., saying “the bar is high” for his own remarks after his brother’s performance.
