Last evening during the Republican National Convention we -- millions and millions of us -- unwittingly became part of a huge experiment. And it doesn't even matter whether we were watching the Convention on television, the experiment happened and we were all automatically part of it.
Melania Trump, Donald's very attractive Snow White-dressed Slovenian-born wife, confidently spoke on behalf of her husband. And the speech was generally well received.
Then the fun began.
I don't know exactly how it happened but someone -- for these purposes it really doesn't matter who -- compared Melania's speech to one Michelle Obama gave a few years back and, fascinatingly, a couple of paragraphs were oddly similar. In fact for about of minute of her speech most of the words words Melania spoke were identical and in the same order as Michelle's.
Scientists call this an observed phenomenon, one that requires explanation. And the first step toward explanation is the formulation of hypotheses -- guesses -- each of which is then examined and either verified or knocked down. At the end of the process, if it's done right, just one hypothesis is left standing, and then we have our explanation as to what happened.
Since the experiment took place in a very public forum, many observers have offered a wide array of hypotheses. Most of these weren't completely serious, as the spectacle of a beautiful white woman with an exotic accent copying a black woman from Chicago is an inherently comical construct. Comedy is contrast, and as this is textbook contrast it became the source of much merriment.
But for the purposes of this exercise let's list the ways this could have happened and, following the scientific method described above, let's see if we can arrive at the most plausible explanation.
First of all I think we can agree Mrs. Trump's speech was written by one or more human beings; this is not a case of some deity carving words on stone tablets or an alien beaming the speech onto the teleprompter. In other word some guy(s) and or gal(s) wrote the speech Mrs. Trump read last night. Could it have been Mrs. Trump herself? That's the first important question we need to answer. But while it's absolutely possible she could have written it, it's highly improbable she would have done so. Why? This is a woman who has shied from public appearances; this is by far the biggest stage on which she has performed. Virtually all politicians have speech writers so since public speaking isn't her main line of work it's nearly certain she had help -- and plenty of it. The fact that English isn't her native tongue is another compelling reason to believe the speech was written for her in whole or great part.
So our attention turns to the person or persons who actually wrote the thing. Imagine someone (we'll use female pronouns but the gender is immaterial) who is given the job of writing Melania Trump's speech on the opening night of the Republican National Convention. Wow! What an opportunity! The whole world is watching! You use those precious minutes to humanize Trump, you fill the time with squishy stories of Trump feeding babies at 4 am, playing touch football, showing up with lush bouquets at every anniversary.
But no.
Melania's speech was nearly devoid of any anecdotes at all; it was as clinical a presentation as someone bucking for board certification in urology.
So to soften the speech the writer includes a couple of paragraphs dredged up from Michelle Obama's of years ago. They are simple, streamlined and (compared with the rest of the speech) emotional. And the writer doesn't change many of Michelle's words -- hardly any in fact -- because (a) she doesn't think they'll be noticed or (b) she wants them to be noticed.
We live in an age of very easy access to information and, also, to tools that detect plagiarism. Most high school students are familiar with instances of teachers finding work that has been copied. Put "plagiarism tracker" into Google and you get "Top 10 Free Plagiarism Detection Tools for Teachers."
So the writer had to know her plagiarism would be found, and quickly.
But to what end?
As a career move it's suicidal unless the writer was doing it to embarrass Mrs. Trump.
In which case it was a spectacularly successful stunt -- in the short term.
What happens next? It's easy to track the author of each iteration of a Word doc so even if she tried covering her tracks, the person will soon be discovered.
It's possible -- barely -- that it will turn out the writer was doing her best to write a good speech for Mrs. Trump and using Mrs. Obama's words were a convenient crutch.
I would handicap that at about one chance in fifty.
Much more likely is that the writer will be found to be a mole, or at least not a Trump fan who did this to cause the speech -- and Mrs. Trump and then Mr. Trump -- to lose credibility.
If that is in fact the case, will Mr. Trump out the perpetrator, thus admitting he couldn't manage to keep his relatively small staff secure?
Or, much more likely, will the matter be buried, overwhelmed by the next news tsunami, and forgotten?
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