Video: Melania Trump Accused Of Plagiarizing Michelle Obama's 2008 DNC Speech

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 19, 2016 2:50PM

Melania Trump / Getty Images

Melania Trump delivered a speech on Monday night at the Republican National Convention that shared several striking similarities to first lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech. Ironically enough, the passage that Trump appears to have refashioned focused on the importance of hard work and honor.

Here's one example:

Obama: “…the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them”

Trump: “…the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.”

Side-by-side videos and overlays showed just how closely that section of Trump’s speech mimicked Obamas’s.

But in keeping with the Trump campaign’s Orwellian relationship to truth and facts, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Trump “hit it out of the park” and “there’s no cribbing.”

“I thought Melania Trump hit it out of the park when she talked about her love of family, the feeling of an immigrant that comes to this country and succeeds,” Manafort told CNN. “And I thought that the feeling she has towards her husband and her depiction of the real Donald Trump came through loud and clear.”

“There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These are common words and values that she cares about her family, things like that,” he went on to say. “I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night. She knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy. This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down. It's not going to work.”

Now, it looks like Obama wasn't the only source of "inspiration" for Trump. As Tauriq Moosa points out, the speech even includes a suspicious similarity to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Consider us Rickrolled.

Of course, this being the 2016 Republican National Convention it was just one of a handful of WTF moments: Alex Jones and the crowd itself were happy to help in that regard, too.