Does it matter if Donald Trump Jr.'s speech recycled old lines?
Again?
Just one day after a scandal erupted over whether Melania Trump plagiarized part of her Republican National Convention speech, another speech by a member of Donald Trump's family got criticized for recycled language.
Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night that many praised.
But some pointed out that part of the speech appears to have been taken from an article on The American Conservative written by F.H. Buckley, entitled "Trump vs. the New Class."
Here's the speech:
In Trump Jr.'s speech, he cites that "schools used to be an elevator to the middle class." A strikingly similar line appeared in Buckley's article published in May.
Related: Melania Trump's speech "classic definition of plagiarism," professor says
"Now they're stalled on the ground floor," Trump Jr. said in his speech. "They're like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers."
As pointed out in a tweet from The Daily Show, the line in Buckley's piece reads:
"What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. ... Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers."
The Daily Show tweet generated so much buzz on Twitter that Buckley -- who wrote parts of Trump Jr.'s speech -- according to NBC, tweeted a response about the plagiarism allegations:
"Such a silly kerfufle about the speech," he tweeted Wednesday morning. "Ironically, the lines I used I didn't invent. I borrowed them from someone else. I forget whom."
In other words, the speechwriter used some words he had written elsewhere in the speech Trump Jr. delivered. Some people believe self-plagiarism is unethical, while others shrug it off.
Although the Trump campaign hasn't made an official comment about Trump Jr.'s speech, Jason Miller, a spokesperson for the Republican nominee's camp, tweeted his thoughts, blaming the continuous attacks on the "Clinton machine":
This latest Trump conflict comes as the campaign continues to struggle to explain the noticeable similarities in Melania Trump's speech the first night of the Republican National Convention, which appeared to lift full phrases from Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic convention speech.
Alexandra Bice is a student at Arizona State University and a Paste BN College correspondent.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.