Donald Trump Jr. gestures to the crowd after delivering a speech on the second day of the Republican National Convention on July 19 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. (Getty)
After Donald Trump Jr. gave the headline speech at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night, The Daily Show pointed out on Twitter that a portion is similar to an essay in The American Conservative by Frank H. Buckley.
But after The Daily Show‘s tweet, Buckley took to Twitter to quickly settle the issue:
He elaborated on that tweet to Business Insider, saying, “I was a speechwriter for this speech. So I’m afraid there’s no issue here.”
The Trump campaign’s senior communications advisor, Jason Miller, responded to the accusation on Twitter:
1/2 Nice try Clinton machine – Francis Buckley is a friend of Don Jr.’s and worked with him on the speech.
2/2 Your time would be better spent searching for Crooked Hillary’s missing emails rather than disparaging a real American Patriot.
The campaign has also denied that Melania Trump plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech.
“They’re a couple of phrases. It’s basically three places in the speech and its fragments of words. She knew what she was doing. And she never cribbed from another speech without acknowledging that she was quoting somebody else,” campaign chairman Paul Manafort told CBS News. “We’re talking about words like compassion, love of family, respect. These are not words that are unique words, that belong to the Obamas.”
You can read the pertinent portion of Donald Jr.’s speech below and watch video of it:
Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers.
The line is similar to part of Buckley’s essay:
Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers.