How Melania Trump’s Speech Veered Off Course and Sparked an Uproar
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.
“It just shouldn’t have happened,” said Matt Latimer, a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush. “This was an easy home run speech: a successful, attractive immigrant talking about her husband.”
Nobody seemed more startled than Mr. and Ms. Trump, who arrived in New York on Tuesday morning after a flight from Cleveland to find themselves at the center of a bizarre uproar over authenticity, plagiarism and a knotty question: Why did the wife of the Republican nominee borrow passages from the wife of the current Democratic president?
Ms. Trump spent most of Tuesday out of sight, while her husband vented his frustration and anger throughout the day.
Much More: How Melania Trump’s Speech Veered Off Course and Sparked an Uproar - The New York Times
Sounds like Melania is an idiot.