Melaina And Michelle

Boy, that escalated quickly.

Okay, to be on the up-and-up, we need to let you know the previous paragraph, all four words of it, was originally stated by Will Farrell’s character in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. We offer this official citation because we don’t want to be accused of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.” Discussion on this topic started in earnest Monday night as the Republican National Convention concluded its first day, when two paragraphs of potential First Lady Melaina Trump’s speech were identified as having been previously orated in 2008 … by current First Lady Michelle Obama.

This is not the first case of plagiarism in politics. In 2008, Hillary Clinton was accused to plagiarizing U.S. Sen. John Edwards multiple times during her presidential campaign. In 2007, President Obama shared speechwriters with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and neglected to give Patrick credit on several occasions. In 2014, U.S. Senate candidate John Walsh of Montana bowed out of the race when it was discovered he’d plagiarized portions of his master’s degree term papers at the U.S. Army War College. And (perhaps) most famously, in 1988, Vice President Joe Biden plagiarized British Labour Party leader Neal Kinnock (not just his words, but his biographical details) during his ill-fated presidential campaign; he was also found to have plagiarized in law school.

All of these received much media play, and in the current world of Twitter, probably would have received infinitely more attention.

But the curious case of Melaina Trump blew up the Internet this week, for three primary reasons.

First, the source. Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s camps have been targeting Democrats and President Barack Obama for some time, so Melaina Trump stealing words from the current FLOTUS and claiming it as her own came off as a stunning public relations blow. Taking words from the “political enemy” and using them for your own purposes reflects very poorly - especially  when the lifted phrases dealt with themes like “hard work” and “integrity.”

Second, the vetting process. Professional political campaigns have at their disposal a number of search tools that can be used to ensure plagiarism doesn’t happen. Whether a simple Google search or using a more sophisticated program like Turnitin, which a number of area schools use to check student writing, the Trump campaign had many options at their disposal.

Third, crisis management. Team Trump fared poorly here, first refusing to accept any blame for the plagiarism and blaming the rival Clinton campaign, then determining that two official speechwriters had sent Melania Trump a draft which she rewrote herself. Nearly 36 hours after the speech, an in-house staff writer named Meredith McIver claimed Melania Trump has a deep appreciation of Michelle Obama and reviewed some passages from her 2008 speech. The final draft was never officially checked before being presented to the world, though.

Given the many other topics of vital importance to Americans, is plagiarism the most important on which to focus? Probably not. But it reinforced dominant themes of the Trump campaign, which has shied away from using experienced political experts, instead playing on instinct.

If any good has come out of the fiasco, it’s that high school and middle school English teachers have a new and modern example of how to teach students the dangers of plagiarism. Perhaps, to paraphrase Karl Marx, history won’t repeat itself.