It was a case of: She said – She said.
In 2008, Michelle Obama said, “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 and that you do what you say.”
This week, Melania Trump said, “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.”
First Lady Obama went on to say: “We want our children, 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.”
This week Ms. Trump went on to say: “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.”
So what does one call the use of another person’s creative property? Apparently, if your are Melania Trump, the spouse of the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, it can simply be dismissed as one of “her life inspirations.” Or, as was suggested by Jason Miller, Trump campaign communications advisor, those phrases that were coincidentally similar to those spoken by Michelle Obama eight years ago, were just “fragments that reflect (Melania’s) own thinking.”
“Inspirations”? “Fragments”?
I’m afraid not. In plain and simple language, they’re “Theft!”
In journalism, in politics and in life, we teach that plagiarism occurs when a person duplicates another person’s language or ideas and then calls the work his/her own. It’s known as literary theft. Copyright laws protect writers’ words as their legal property. Everybody who respects the uniqueness of creativity in a lyric, a poem, a piece of narrative or a piece of oratory, considers the unattributed use of that person’s creativity to be a very serious offense, indeed against the law.
The problem, I’m afraid, is that in the age of universal access to the Internet and putting a gazillion applications in the hands of people with smart phones, nobody considers the notion of “forwarding,” “re-Tweeting,” or “cutting and pasting,” as anything more than the innocent act of passing it along. The hope is that they’ll say, “You’re brilliant!” No. The more appropriate response is “You’re a thief,” especially if you give the impression that it was your idea in the first place.
But let’s go back to Melania Trump’s speech and the way the Trump campaign went into damage control, or more accurately, how the Trump campaign “opened its mouth to change feet,” as my dad used to say. (By the way, for those who don’t know, that’s called attribution, something I guess Trump’s speech writers don’t understand.) After they tried to pass it all off as “inspirations” and “fragments,” another RNC strategist, Sean Spicer, said, “Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony said, ‘this is your dream – anything you can do in your dreams, you can do now…’ And he added that it wasn’t plagiarism, because people can take plenty of phrases and source them on Google and come up with a list of a lot of different authors in minutes. So, why didn’t the people at Trump’s campaign office try that?
If you do some good old-fashioned checking, it doesn’t take long to discover the origin of such things as speech origins. If you run a check on, “Four score and seven years ago…” you come up with Abraham Lincoln. If you check “The 20th century belongs to Canada,” you come up with Wilfrid Laurier. Similarly, “Nothing to fear, but fear itself,” yields FDR and “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” is clearly Winston Churchill. Yes, those are all copyrighted speeches. Even Google will tell you that. My students often hear me criticize their laziness when it comes to cross-referencing their writing. And I generally repeat the same admonition: “If your mother says she loves you, check!”
All too often in the professional world we hear the excuse: “We didn’t know we were plagiarizing.” Well, I’m sorry, but ignorance of the concept of copyright is no excuse for anybody, most certainly potential First Lady Trump, to make statements as blatantly stolen/plagiarized from First Lady Obama. But then, ignorance appears to be a problem rampant in the Donald Trump Republican Presidential campaign.
As I write this column on Tuesday evening, Katrina Pierson, one of Trump’s aids, shot back at Melania Trump’s critics saying, “This concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd.” She didn’t stop there. Pierson added that the values of hard work, determination, family values, dedication and respect are Republican values, in other words, that the Grand Old Party invented them. Hmmm. So the Republicans invented respect and the interpretation that stealing someone else’s words is respectful?
