CLEVELAND — When Melania Trump took the stage Monday as a character witness for her husband, California delegates at the Republican National Convention hung on every word and clapped as she told them about the values her parents had instilled in her.
Back at their hotel a couple of hours later, however, the delegates found themselves having to defend the woman they hope is the next first lady from accusations that her speech plagiarized key phrases from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech.
Some language appeared to have been lifted from the first lady’s speech, but several delegates insisted it was a molehill that the “liberal media” was making into a mountain.
Melania Trump is a good person and her “actions speak a lot louder than words,” said Susan Walsh, a Donald Trump alternate delegate from Tulare County after a reporter read her transcripts of the two speeches.
Arnold Peter, an attorney from Los Angeles, took a more legalistic approach. It technically wasn’t plagiarism, he said, because Obama’s speech was already in the public domain.
Several delegates, speaking on the condition of anonymity, were nonetheless befuddled that the Trump campaign hadn’t properly vetted the speech — which his wife had told Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today Show” that she mostly wrote herself. “Clearly someone made a big mistake,” one Southern California delegate said.
The passage that appeared to have been lifted from Obama’s speech concerned Trump’s life lessons from her parents in Slovenia. Some of the statements were virtually identical, as first uncovered by reporter Jarrett Hill.
From Obama in 2008: “Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values like: You work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you’re gonna do…”
And from Trump on Monday: “My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, and you do what you say…”
She continued to parrot Obama’s speech for several more lines.
Trump campaign officials on Tuesday refused to concede that any plagiarism had taken place.
“There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech,” Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort told CNN. “These were common words and values that she cares about her family and things like that. I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night, she knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama’s words is crazy.”
By Tuesday morning, the speech controversy was dominating cable news channels and social media, threatening to undermine GOP efforts to frame the election as a contest between a strong leader in Trump and a weak one in Clinton.
Chuck McDougald, a delegate from South San Francisco first learned about the controversy on Fox News early Tuesday, and said that the media was blowing it out of proportion.
“It was a great speech,” he said. “Little things like this is what makes conventions interesting. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. It’s a big deal now, but it will go away soon because there will be another big deal tonight.”
Contact Matthew Artz at 510-208-6435. Follow him at Twitter.com/Matthew_Artz.
