Dilbert creator Scott Adams responded Tuesday to accusations that potential First Lady Melania Trump plagiarized her Republican National Convention speech Monday night from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Rather than a case of “clever” persuasion, where Trump intended the media to equate his wife with current First Lady Michelle Obama, this was much more likely to be a simple mistake in the speechwriting process, Adams said via Periscope.
He noted that while other Trump gaffes seemed to have been calculated to create media attention and plant certain ideas in the public imagination, there was a more plausible theory, which Adams drew on his own writing experiences to explain.
“I look at this as a writer,” he said, “and ask, if i were helping to write the speech, how could this happen as an accident?”
He explained: “It could happen so easily that people would genuinely not know that they had plagiarized it.
Adams noted that when teams of writers collaborate on a speech, they often contribute different insights and ideas, including suggestions of examples to follow from other speeches.
“You could imagine that a first draft would be largely plagiarized, just as placeholders.”
Over time, Adams noted, the draft becomes “a giant clusterfuck” in which authors and sources are lost beyond retrieval.
“Was this some kind of a clever plan so that people compare Melania to Michelle?” he asked. “No! He didn’t fucking do that! And here’s why: He’s not going to embarrass his wife in front of the the whole country.” He added that Trump might deliberately embarrass himself, but that there was no sense in embarrassing his own wife, and no way his campaign would.
While embarrassing for Melania Trump, he said, “It’s the luckiest mistake anybody ever made,” given that everyone was talking about her as “a sympathetic character.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, will be published by Regnery on July 25 and is available for pre-order through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.