Donald Trump Jr Speechwriter Says There Was No Plagiarism

2 minute read
By Will Drabold

Donald Trump Jr. used multiple sentences in a convention speech Tuesday night that were similar to phrases published in an article in The American Conservative in May.

But the author of the article says nothing was stolen from his work. That’s because he was an author of the convention speech.

“I was a principal speechwriter for the speech,” F. H. Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University, wrote to TIME. “So it’s not an issue.”

The phrases, <a href="

“>first reported by The Daily Show, were written by Buckley in a May 2, 2016 article entitled “Trump vs. the New Class.” The article criticized Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, as a “new liberal.” The similarities between the article’s passages and Trump Jr.’s speech came after Melania Trump was accused of plagiarizing Michelle Obama in a Monday night speech at the convention.

In his speech, Trump’s eldest son, said:

“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.”

In his May article, F.H. Buckley wrote:

“What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the system’s entrenched interests: the teachers’ unions and the higher-education professoriate. 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.”

👀 pic.twitter.com/QEftnTTwy3

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 20, 2016

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