I’m not like hoping people lose their jobs or say negative things about Melania.

But it’s important for me to say that I had no mean spirited intentions behind my tweets. This is one of those moments where I think of that old saying, 'Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.' The Donald Trump campaign has been peeing on our legs for a long time and told us to look somewhere else.ĮB: What does that say about the Trump campaign and this election in general? I expected they would find some way to not apologize. An entertainer has to reach out to their audience. I think that he believes, his supporters believe some things. I don’t even know that I genuinely believe that Donald Trump believes all of the things he says. I think they probably come out and say negative things even when they aren’t necessarily upset, so that they can appear to be angry with the president. They would never want to say that President Obama did something well. If you are a Republican, you cannot be friends with a Democrat, let alone agree with them or say something that they said or give them praise, right? The Trump campaign would never want to quote Michelle Obama. JH: I think this actually really speaks to the polarization of our country right now. Why do you think the Trump campaign initially tried to credit everyone but Michelle? The day after the speech, the campaign came up with many excuses, from saying that 'Michelle Obama didn’t invent the English language' to even implying that a My Little Pony character said something similar. I ended up saying the words 'and your willingness to work for them' back to the screen, which is when I had a moment of Oh, I know that line … Oh my God, I know that line.ĮB: Until Wednesday, the Trump camp vehemently denied plagiarizing the speech. When I heard it in on Monday it was very familiar. I particularly remember this one quote: 'the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' I remember thinking, 'Whoa, that was really well done.' Obviously I had no idea eight years later it would come back to play in such a big way for the country and myself. JH: I’ve always been a big fan of the Obamas and was watching with bated breath in 2008. #GOPConventionĮB: What about Michelle Obama’s speech resonated with you and caused you to remember it? I thought to myself, 'I definitely know where I heard that before.' If you look at my tweets, they definitely graduated, right? One of them is like, look at this little line!ĬORRECTION: Melania stole a whole graph from Michelle's speech. Jarrett Hill: I knew the quote immediately because of the way we file a quote away in our minds. I talked to Hill to find out what it felt like to scoop the story of the week and whether the plagiarism will damage Trump.Įlisha Brown: When did you first realize that Melania Trump’s RNC speech on Monday was so similar to first lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech? At first the Trump campaign denied that the speech had been plagiarized, but by Wednesday a speechwriter named Meredith McIver took the blame. Hill’s scoop inspired countless news stories. People took notice - the tweet where Hill highlighted the paragraph that Trump lifted from Obama’s speech got 25,000 retweets.

Hill started tweeting about the similarities between Trump’s speech and the speech Michelle Obama made at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. 'I thought to myself, ‘I definitely know where I heard that before,’' he told me in a recent interview. Midway through Trump’s remarks, Hill realized her words were very familiar. Jarrett Hill was sitting in a California Starbucks on Monday night, watching a live stream of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech.

Melania trump copied speech