By Sandy Wells
KABC News
Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention in Cleveland last night had a number of phrases that appeared to have been lifted almost verbatim from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic Convention. Matt Latimer, a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, says the screw-up should never have occurred.
“It’s a speechwriter’s nightmare for something like this to happen and I think this just goes to show this is an amateur campaign. It’s not being run in a professional manner. There’s some things about that that people like, because it’s fresh and different, but then there a lot of drawbacks and disastrous potential consequences such as embarrassing, potentially, the First Lady of the United States for no apparent reason.”
Latimer says it seems that many steps were skipped before the final draft was given to Melania Trump to read at the convention.
“In a normal professional speech writing operation, you don’t just have one speechwriter just writing something and it gets delivered. You have a process. You have people who are vetting the speech, people who are fact checking the speech, you have people who are proof-reading it, making sure that you don’t plagiarize something.”
Latimer says in a campaign of this size there are usually ten or twelve speechwriters. But in the case of Trump, they have newcomers to the process, or they are just winging it.
Latimer was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning with Doug McIntyre and Terri-Rae Elmer.