Melania Trump latest in a long line of political borrowers
Melania Trump’s suspicious echoing of the words of Michelle Obama are just the latest case of plagiarism in political speech writing
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Melania Trump has been caught out at the Republican National Convention delivering lines that echo those delivered by Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 in Denver.
Donald Trump is said to be furious about the slip-up by staffers who penned the speech while political opponents claim it underlines the chaos surrounding the Trump campaign.
“Borrowing” words from past orators, authors and even screenwriters is something of a political tradition.
The ancient Roman senator Cicero was accused of ripping off Demosthenes’ Philippics, published speeches against Philip of Macedon, in his own speeches against Marc Anthony, later also dubbed Philippics. But it seems to have been a case of the Roman orator consciously modelling his speeches on those of another great orator rather than wholesale theft. Also his audiences would have known of the original speeches and drawn parallels between Antony and Philip that would have helped dent Antony’s reputation.
Even US president Abraham Lincoln stole pithy phrases, many of them unattributed Biblical quotations that would have been well known to his audiences.
One such was “a house divided against itself cannot stand”, adapted from a quote from Jesus in the Gospels, which Lincoln uttered in a speech during a series of 1858 debates. But Lincoln is accused of borrowing the phrase not from the Bible but from a similar utterance in 1850 by Senator Sam Houston: “A nation divided against itself cannot stand.”
Lincoln is also said to have adapted a phrase by John Wycliffe from the dedication of his 14th-century bible.
Wycliffe wrote: “The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People”.
In his famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln hoped that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” but gave no attribution to Wycliffe (long since dead and past suing).
In 1950 US senator Joe McCarthy warned that communist spies were doing more than taking “30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a new weapon”, saying that they were positioning themselves in the government to “guide and shape our policy”.
His speech was almost word for word the same as one delivered by young congressman Richard Nixon some weeks before. Not surprising, given how the two men lined up in terms of their anti-communist stance, but it passed the assembled journalists and went unnoticed until years after it was delivered.
US president John F. Kennedy borrowed phrases from Lincoln’s speeches, rarely giving credit. Kennedy also took his inaugural address remark “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” from Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1884 speech: “Recall what our country has done for each of us, and ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.”
Another US politician who got caught out was then senator Joe Biden in September 1987. He borrowed lines and ideas from British politician Neil Kinnock, who in May 1987 had asked rhetorically: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?” He answered the question by saying that his coalmining football playing ancestors had “no platform upon which they could stand”.
Biden rearranged Kinnock’s words slightly but also talked about being the first in his coalmining, football playing family to go to university and that their forebears lacked a “platform” on which to stand.
Although he had credited Kinnock in previous speeches this time there was no attribution, so Biden withdrew from the 1988 presidential race.
Even Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was accused of appropriating words for his 1968 “I have a dream” speech.
The last part of the speech quotes from the 1832 patriotic song America and in particular its phrase “let freedom ring”. King said: “Let freedom ring from various mountains and hills across America.”
Throughout his speech King drew on various sources of inspiration: the Bible, Shakespeare and a 1962 speech in which civil rights activist Prathia Hall repeated the phrase “I have a dream”, assembling these familiar elements into an original and powerful new speech.
Congressional candidate Vaughn Ward had less lofty notions in 2010 when he purloined large parts of a “crossroads of history” speech from 2004 that had been delivered by the then newly elected senator Barack Obama. Ward was dubbed the worst congressional candidate in American history.
Australia’s Anthony Albanese borrowed words from a novel source for a televised address to the National Press Club in 2012.
The then federal Infrastructure and Transport Minister’s words were not an exact quote, but it was clear he had drawn on a speech delivered by fiction US president Andrew Shepherd — played by Michael Douglas in the 1995 film The American President.
Originally published as Melania Trump latest in a long line of political borrowers
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