How Melania Trump’s Speech Veered Off Course and Caused an Uproar
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and MICHAEL BARBARO JULY 19, 2016
nytimes.com
CLEVELAND — It was the biggest speech of Melania Trump’s life, and her husband, Donald, wanted it to be perfect.The Trump campaign turned to two high-powered speechwriters, who had helped write signature political oratory like George W. Bush’s speech to the nation on Sept. 11, 2001, to introduce Ms. Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, to the nation on the opening night of the Republican National Convention.
It did not go as planned, and it has eclipsed much of the action at the party gathering in Cleveland, where delegates on Tuesday night formally nominated Mr. Trump for president.
The speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, sent Ms. Trump a draft last month, eager for her approval.
Weeks went by. They heard nothing.
Inside Trump Tower, it turned out, Ms. Trump had decided she was uncomfortable with the text, and began tearing it apart, leaving a small fraction of the original.
Her quiet plan to wrest the speech away and make it her own set in motion the most embarrassing moment of the convention: word-for-word repetition of phrases and borrowed themes from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention eight years ago.
The ridicule from both Democrats and Republicans was instant and relentless, disrupting what was meant to be a high point of the convention.
It was, by all accounts, an entirely preventable blunder, committed in front of an audience of 23 million television viewers, that exposed the weaknesses of an organization that has long spurned the safeguards of a modern presidential campaign, such as the free software that detects plagiarism.
In a series of evolving explanations, Trump aides and allies dismissed the episode as a trivial distraction, alternating between outright denial that Ms. Trump’s speech had used word-for-word phrases from Mrs. Obama and blaming the news media.
“Ninety-three percent of the speech is completely different,” declared Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, pegged the number of suspicious words at 50. “And that includes ‘ands’ and ‘thes’ and things like that,” he said on Tuesday.
Across the country, slack-jawed Republican political operatives and speechwriters expressed expletive-laden bewilderment at the organizational breakdown allowing such an episode to occur.
“It’s like some guy trying to paddle across a river in a rowboat who shoots a hole in his boat,” said Stuart Stevens, who wrote speeches for Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, throughout the 2012 campaign.
In interviews, alarmed Republican speechwriters outlined the layers of formal scrutiny, apparently disregarded by the Trump campaign, traditionally applied to almost every draft of a major convention address. They described word-by-word fact-checking by a dedicated team of experts and computer software designed to catch plagiarism. Several online programs, like DupliChecker, are available at no cost.
“It’s pretty standard,” Mr. Stevens said of the software, which detects overlap in word choice and sentence structure. “We used it.”
An urgent priority: avoiding the slightest hint of oratorical theft.
“The most cardinal rule of any speech-writing operation is that you cannot plagiarize,” said Mr. Latimer, the Bush speechwriter, who is now a partner at Javelin, a communications firm. If you do, he said, “you lose your job.”
That is unlikely to happen in the Trump campaign, which revolves around a freewheeling candidate with a fierce resistance to admitting error.
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