Melania Trump, who was the focus of primetime during Day 1 of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Monday night, gave an inspiring speech. But, sections of the speech appear to have been plagiarized from Michelle Obama‘s 2008 Democratic Convention Speech – and Donald Trump‘s campaign is flailing in its attempts to do damage control.

Melania Trump’s RNC Speech Plagiarized?

Melania has remained mostly behind-the-scenes during her husband’s campaign to become the next president of the Unites States, with his adult children taking on more prominent roles. For Melania, Monday was her opportunity to formally introduce herself, share anecdotes from her own history and to make the case for her husband to win the race for the White House. And it had seemed as though she’d done a more than passable job.

Though Melania was initially praised for her poise on the massive RNC stage, with media commentators agreeing about the speech’s success, the praise was short-lived. Journalist Jarrett Hill was the first to point out the similarities between Melania’s and Obama’s speeches, even providing paragraphs from the current First Lady’s speech, highlighted to show what Melania Trump’s speech had plagiarized.

Videos now show the respective speeches side-by-side to drive home the point.

Not long after the plagiarism question was first raised, Trump’s campaign released the following statement:

“In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.”

By Tuesday morning, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort decided to shift strategies slightly, and is now outright denying any plagiarism at all. “To think that [Melania] would do something like that knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night is just really absurd… There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech. These were common words and values,” he said on CNN.

Manafort went on to try to make the allegations of plagiarism a Hillary Clinton campaign-driven conspiracy. “To think that she’d be cribbing Michelle Obama’s words is crazy… This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, she seeks out to demean her and take her down,” he said. “It’s not going to work.”

While Manafort is denying the plagiarism, Trump surrogate Chris Christie seems to be conceding that some of the speech was plagiarized – but it was too small a percentage of it to be significant.

“93 percent of the speech is completely different from Michelle Obama’s speech,” Christie told Matt Lauer on Today.

As for RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, he sees some sense in firing whomever was responsible for writing Melania’s speech.

Melania is probably now wishing she hadn’t claimed to have written her convention speech. “I read it once over, and that’s all because I wrote it with as little help as possible,” she told Lauer ahead of walking inside the convention.

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