Melania Trump speech: campaign admits Republican convention address was cribbed from Michelle Obama

Speechwriter Meredith McIver said Donald Trump had refused her resignation, telling her it was an ‘innocent mistake’

Melania Trump ‘has always liked’ Michelle Obama, her speechwriter said (Reuters)

After two days of denials and prevarication, the Trump campaign has admitted that Melania Trump’s Republican convention speech did, in fact, contain passages cribbed from Michelle Obama’s address to the 2008 Democratic convention.

On Wednesday, the writer behind Ms Trump’s speech acknowledged its debt to Ms Obama’s, saying Ms Trump had read passages from the 2008 text to her, which she later included in a draft without checking how closely the two speeches resembled each other. Meredith McIver, a former ballet dancer who reportedly helped to ghost-write Mr Trump’s 2005 book Think Like a Billionaire, worked with Ms Trump to hone her Monday night address, which earned positive early reviews – until the plagiarism accusations emerged.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Ms McIver said she and Ms Trump had “discussed many people who inspired her”, and that “a person she has always liked is Michelle Obama. Over the phone, she read me some passages from Mrs Obama’s speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps…No harm was meant.”

The morning after the speech, Mr Trump’s team had insisted the plagiarism claims were unfounded. “There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech,” Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort told CNN, later blaming the controversy on, of all people, Hillary Clinton. The furore was “another example of when Hillary Clinton is threatened by a female, the first thing she does is try to destroy that person,” Mr Manafort said at a press briefing on Tuesday.

The statement from speechwriter Meredith McIver

In an interview with NBC recorded before she delivered the speech, Ms Trump claimed she had written the text herself, “with as little help as possible”.

In her statement taking responsibility for the mistake, Ms McIver said she had tendered her resignation to the Republican presidential nominee and his family, but that they had rejected it. “Mr Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences,” she wrote.

Before Ms McIver outed herself, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Mr Manafort’s predecessor, Corey Lewandowski, had both suggested the offending speechwriter ought to be fired. Mr Lewandowski, who was himself dumped by the Trump campaign in June, said: “If the staff did not do their job properly…there should be accountability.”