The Trump campaign dismisses criticism that Melania Trump directly lifted two passages nearly word-for-word from the speech that Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention, calling the complaints “just absurd.”
“There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech,” Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, tells CNN. “Certainly, there’s no feeling on her part that she did it,” he said. “What she did was use words that are common words.”
The passages in question from Mrs. Trump’s address at the Republican National Convention last night focused on lessons that she says she learned from her parents and the relevance of their lessons in her experience as a mother.
Manafort says Mrs. Trump was aware of “how her speech was going to be scrutinized” and that any notion that she picked up portions of Mrs. Obama’s convention talk was “just absurd.”
The White House declined to comment on similarities between the two prime-time speeches, but the issue is likely to arise at the daily White House briefing.
Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
— AP
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