Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Since he lost his TV reporting job last year, Jarrett Hill has been looking for his next opportunity. It presented itself in an unexpected way.  Hill was sitting at a corner table Monday night in a Culver City Starbucks, drinking a venti iced coffee and watching the Republican National Convention on an MSNBC live stream.

As Melania Trump spoke, she uttered a phrase that the 31-year-old California native had heard once before — from First Lady Michelle Obama. “… the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams …,” Melania Trump said during her address to the Republican National Convention.

Instinctively, Hill finished the phrase aloud to his laptop screen: “… and your willingness to work for them.” “Kind of like a song that you haven’t heard in a long time and you remember the lyrics as you hear them. Or a movie that you know the line to and you kind of respond to it,” he said.

He recalled the words from Michelle Obama’s speech because, he said, he had thought to himself at the time that it was “really beautifully written.” “I believe I even wrote it down or typed it,” Hill said. “Obviously having no idea that eight years later I’d hear them again from a woman who wanted to be first lady speaking at a convention in front of 40 million people.”...

Parts of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention are strikingly similar to Michelle Obama’s speech from eight years ago. How does this happen? Plagiarism at this level is typically the result of sloppiness, not outright theft. If you don’t want this to happen to you, then you need to change how you work.

What Melania Trump said sounds awfully familiar.

In 2008, here’s what Michelle Obama said, in part (most of the highlights in these passages, which show the similar parts, are from a Wall Street Journal article about the plagiarism).

Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves. And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.

And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation.

Because we want our children—and all children in this nation—to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them....