Jimmy Fallon thinks he’s heard one of President Donald Trump’s commencement speeches before: From Elle Woods, in the Hollywood movie, Legally Blonde.
That’s set the Internet ablaze with people accusing Trump of plagiarizing the Reese Witherspoon film. You can watch the side-by-side comparison and judge for yourself. Of course, many commencement speeches are chock full of stock, cliched phrases. That’s what they are known for.
According to Daily Variety, Fallon ran the skit on May 16 on his show, skewering Trump’s May 13 commencement speech at Liberty University and making it the “center” of his monologue.
Daily Variety points out that the Fallon video may have been edited to place the words in different order; in other words, it’s a joke, and Trump probably didn’t plagiarize the Elle Woods speech. However, Fallon mocked the president for relying on “platitudes” in the commencement address, reports Daily Variety. Fallon said he thought the similarities were a coincidence, the Hollywood trade magazine reported.
During his speech, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Trump “told graduates to follow their convictions despite whatever criticism they might encounter and ‘relish the opportunity to be an outsider.'” Fallon’s show also contained a series of other jokes about the president.
Here’s Trump’s full speech at Liberty University:
Here’s Elle Woods’:
Of course, the president’s wife, Melania Trump, was famously accused of cribbing a Michelle Obama speech at the Republican National Convention. But no one thinks that Trump actually stole the words of Legally Blonde on purpose.
A 2001 comedy, Legally Blonde showcased, according to IMDB, “a fashionable sorority queen” who “is dumped by her boyfriend. She decides to follow him to law school, while she is there she figures out that there is more to her than just looks.”
Reese Witherspoon. (Getty)
Trump gave another commencement speech before the U.S. Coast Guard Academy on May 17, but no one accused him of plagiarizing it from a Hollywood movie. At least not yet.
You can watch that commencement speech here:
