[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcbiGsDMmCM[/youtube]
This is clearly plagiarizing. And yet Trump’s campaign, and everyone affiliated with it, is not doing the usual thing — which is to say a staffer made a mistake, fire the staffer, and move on. Instead, they are making the unprecedented move of denying that it was plagiarism. This is, clearly, extraordinary.
I’ve been scratching my head as to why they’re doing this, and I’ve come up with a somewhat plausible, charitable explanation.
I work at a university for graduate students in the health sciences, and I’m the go-to person to explain to plagiarizers how what they’re doing is plagiarism. I’ve also taught several students, and dealt with a few students who have plagiarized in that role, as well.
Almost all of the students I’ve had interactions with who have plagiarized were not native to the United States, and they were angry at the prospect that they had plagiarized. I’ve noticed that the more high-profile the assignment, the more the student was likely to think that plagiarism was a sign of respect for the assignment. They were so intimidated by the assignment, and so respectful of the assignment, that they thought it would be insulting the assignment to use their own words. So they used words others had used in a similar situation. It may be hard for those entrenched in an American culture with a strong regard for originality to understand, but for these students doing so was not dishonest. It was a sign of respect for the nature of the writing event — a nod to tradition.
Yes, it’s true that on some level they may have thought it was plagiarism. But the higher-profile the assignment was, the harder it was for them to consciously avoid plagiarism, and the more they tended to think that using words borrowed from previous events respected tradition. Again, they did not think of this as cheating. They thought of this as respect. And the more high-profile the assignment was — for themselves and for others — the harder it was for them to do the brainwork required to remind themselves this was plagiarism (something that did not, naturally, feel wrong to them).
When I am assigned to talk to these students about plagiarism (as happens from time-to-time) I prepare myself for what I’m about to encounter. With very few exceptions (and those exceptions were all native American speakers) these students were not repentant, but furiously angry. Here they were, trying to give respect to an important writing event and expecting everyone to be pleased — for them to prove that they respected the rhetorical situation and all those involved in it, to the highest possible degree. For many, it was one of — if not the — most important opportunities to show respect in their lives.
They thought that using the words of others was showing respect to all those who depended on them to do an outstanding job that meshed well with the tradition of that assignment. And by the time they got to me (after being reprimanded, in several cases, by the school) they had already, in many cases, came out of a meeting where the very people they had been trying to impress telling them that they been profoundly DISrespectful of that event — not only that, they had disrespected it in the worst way possible and shown themselves to be embarrassingly incompetent. The anger and frustration and humiliation is hard to overemphasize. So I had to be patient and understanding, trust that they were good people with good intentions, and calm them down if I was going to move past their humiliation and help them avoid plagiarism.
I think this is probably what happened with Melania Trump, for the following reasons:
- Melania Trump has been in the United States for about 20 years, but she has not done academic writing for an American university, and has been out of school since about 1990, having dropped out of college at about 18. The likelihood is very high that she is not naturally a strong writer in English, according to conventional American standards, much like much of the people (many of them professionals) I tutor who have been out of school for a decade or more. Add being out of school for so long to no experience at an American school, and you have a situation very similar to those of many international students I’ve run into who have unintentionally plagiarized under the stress of a high-profile writing situation (and in some ways, her situation is even more difficult).
- Before the speech, she said she wrote it “with as little help as possible.” If a speechwriter put the plagiarized words in, they would be fired (as former campaign director Corey Lewandowski pointed out). But you can’t fire Melania Trump. So the only way this makes sense, really, is if Melania Trump put the words in.
- This is the most high-profile moment of Melania Trump’s life. She’s speaking in front of 40 million people. She’s trying to get her husband elected President. Keynote address of the evening. She had the responsibility of writing much of her own speech. So the anxiety would have been much, much higher than usual to look at past successful speeches, see how well they worked, and use parts of them in order to be sure to respect the event.
- There are indications that this was not intentional plagiarism. She did change the words slightly (though they are obviously plagiarized). The majority of the speech was not plagiarized. The only part that was plagiarized came near the beginning, at one of the most important parts of the speech — and again, she did make an attempt to tweak words slightly. In an event like this, if you were doing your own speech, you would likely look at past speeches, too, right? Just to know what the protocol was. She probably did the same, but was not as adept as most native Americans with more experience in school might be at making the sentiments her own. The tweaking is very similar to what I see when a student who has English as their second language and has a different cultural background tries to avoid plagiarism without knowing what, in American culture, plagiarism is.
- The denial that this is plagiarism only makes sense if Melania Trump is acting the way most international, ESL students act when I’ve seen them called out on plagiarism. There is a strong tendency to preserve the image they worked so hard to make — to insist they were not plagiarizing (in their minds, often, they were not), to insist the sentiments were their own, and to be thoroughly insulted at the idea that they were incompetent. Remember, the reason for the plagiarizing, and the reason they are often blind to it, is anxiety over their own competence. This insistence would be especially strong after experiencing a moment in which they were successful in their hard-fought goal in front of millions of people.
- (5) Would explain why Donald Trump has not yet spoke. His wife does not want to appear incompetent, and the marriage has to appear amicable and strong at all costs. He has to stand with his wife. So he can’t call her out, which means the campaign can’t call her out. But he also can’t come out himself and say that his wife didn’t plagiarize, because that would make him look ridiculous. So he sends out his cronies as the fall guys repeating his wife’s insistence that she didn’t plagiarize, protects his wife, and stays silent on the issue. Making this about Clinton allows Melania Trump to displace her anger (and Trump supporters’ anger) towards the situation onto Clinton, making the husband and wife and Trump supporters an even stronger team.
That’s the theory that makes sense…if we’re being charitable. Again, having seen this play out on a smaller scale, the progression looks strikingly familiar. But we’ll see what happens.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. I have a Patreon, if you want to help me do what I do.