Trump speechwriter comes clean on plagiarism

There it was, a small detail in the biography of the Donald Trump employee who fell on her sword and confessed to plagiarizing parts of the speech delivered by Melania Trump on Monday night at the Republican National Convention.

It seems that Meredith McIver was (gasp!) an English major.

Don’t we English majors have a hard enough time justifying our choice to pursue this course of study – rather than something useful – without being lumped in with a plagiarist in the Trump camp? As an English major, McIver should have been aware of how important it is to do a thorough rewrite when stealing someone else’s ideas.

She’s a traitor to the cause of picking a major that, essentially, qualifies us to teach English courses or, maybe, to write for a newspaper because we had no desire to buckle down and learn serious subjects such as math, engineering, chemistry or somebody else’s language. The only major less useful than English is a drama major, which basically qualifies you to wait tables.

But an English major at least provides you the opportunity to improve the quality of your cocktail chatter: “Yes, of course I know that Thomas Mann wrote ‘The Magic Mountain.’ No, of course I haven’t read it, but I hope to someday.”

In fact, many an English major has failed to read, cover to cover, the books that were assigned to us in class. But even a passing familiarity with the likes of Blake or Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky can lead people to assume we’re well read when, in fact, we probably are far more familiar with the works of writers such as Fleming, Grisham and King.

In her New York Times bio, McIver also is credited with working with Trump on some of his books, including “Think Like a Billionaire” and “Trump: How to Get Rich,” so we know she has an aptitude for fiction. This might have led her to take liberties with the crafting of Melania’s speech, which should have been mostly non-fiction.

Or we could take her word for what happened: It was a “mistake.” Specifically, she said, Melania has always admired Michelle Obama, and she read McIver some passages over the phone from Mrs. Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention as examples of what had inspired her.

“I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused ... ” McIver wrote in her mea culpa. She volunteered to resign, but, because she is a long-time Trump loyalist, the family refused the offer.

Yes, it might have been McIver’s mistake initially, but the bigger mistake was not having members of the campaign staff go over the speech several dozen times with a microscope before Melania was dispatched to deliver it. And then, to make matters worse, Trump staffers, including campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spent two days denying that the words in the speech had been plagiarized, saying that they were just expressions of common themes and certainly were not lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech – even though they were the same words.

“Nothing to see here; I didn’t eat the cake,” said the kid with chocolate frosting all over his face.

In an even more bizarre and hopeless effort to deflect the blame, Manafort accused Hillary Clinton of spreading false rumors about plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech.

“This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down,” Manafort said.

This actually is a prime example of how confessing right away after getting caught red-handed is usually a better recourse than resorting to obfuscation and statements that obviously have been made up out of thin air – or what is commonly known as the “Hey, look over there!” gambit.

Let’s be clear, this act of plagiarism is not a Watergate-level offense. It probably will be completely forgotten in a couple of weeks.

But that is, unfortunately for Trump, because he probably has a lot crazier stuff in store for us down the road.

This story was originally published July 21, 2016 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Trump speechwriter comes clean on plagiarism."