Meredith McIver, a former ballerina and in-house staff writer for the Trump Organization, has released a statement taking responsibility for Melania Trump’s ludicrously plagiarized speech given at the RNC on Monday night.
This is a characteristically fearless turnaround from yesterday, when Melania said on the Today Show that she wrote the speech “with as little help as possible”; campaign manger Paul Manafort also declared that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, and if it had, the culprit was probably Hillary Clinton, ruler of Hades and mastermind of Everything Bad That Happens.
Notably, McIver says in her statement that “a person she [Melania] has always liked is Michelle Obama.” Although this might not reveal anything that significant about Melania Trump’s very mysterious personal and political beliefs—maybe she likes Michelle’s sculpted arms, or perhaps she enjoys her style choices—it is a highly awkward sentence to drop into such a polarized political environment, especially considering the fact that her husband accused Michelle Obama’s husband of faking his birth certificate and colluding with terrorists.
The New York Times reported yesterday that Melania Trump enlisted McIver to help rewrite a speech penned by speechwriters Matthew Scully and John McConnell, who reportedly first learned of the rewrites when Melania was delivering her remarks onstage. From the Times:
It was, by all accounts, an entirely preventable blunder, committed in front of an audience of 23 million television viewers, that exposed the weaknesses of an organization that has long spurned the safeguards of a modern presidential campaign, such as the free software that detects plagiarism.
“It just shouldn’t have happened,” said Matt Latimer, a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush. “This was an easy home run speech: a successful, attractive immigrant talking about her husband.”
Nonetheless, McIver’s statement claims that Trump rejected her resignation, telling her that “people make innocent mistakes.”
Seems like plagiarism isn’t one of those?