Don the con and the art of the steal

[Legion Troll]

When viewers spotted uncanny similarities between Melania Trump’s Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention, and a Michelle Obama speech from 2008, Trump surrogates protested that Melania’s speech was “93 percent… completely different.”

The plagiarism is blatant enough to flunk the speech by middle school grading standards. But the Trump family has lifted more than just 7 percent of one speech.

While his career path has veered from real estate personality to Republican nominee, one of Trump’s most constant trademarks has been a penchant for plagiarism.

In 2005, after his so-called “Trump University” folded under fraud allegations, The Donald launched Trump Institute, a similarly named series of questionable real estate courses promising to make students rich on Trump’s dubious “wealth-creating secrets.”

Trump Institute students say the wealth neither materialized—and neither did Trump’s allegedly personal investing secrets. A New York Times investigation found that at least 20 pages of the Trump Institute textbooks were lifted in near-entirety from a book in the “Real Estate Mastery System,” a 1995 series completely unaffiliated with Trump.

When Trump hit the campaign trail, the copy-paste trend followed him.

Trump’s official campaign site has hosted a number of local news articles reproduced without attribution. On its webpage, the campaign copied and pasted radio station KBSX’s 2012 article on election law, removing the author’s name and renaming the story “REQUIREMENTS TO VOTE FOR TRUMP.”

Not only had the article been plagiarized, it was also advertised out-of-date voter information.

“Clearly we were not contacted by the Trump campaign for permission to use old content from our website,” Peter Morrill, KBSX’s general manager, said. “It’s a four-year-old story. Over the last four years, there have been changes to the election laws.”

The Trump campaign’s Arkansas, Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan websites also lifted articles on voter registration directly from local news outlets.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/19/donald-trump-has-plagiarized-a-lot-of-words.html

 

[Legion Troll]

In March 2016, Trump published an op-ed in the Pacific News Daily.

The text of the article appeared to borrow heavily from an op-ed Trump’s one-time rival Ben Carson had published in February.

The op-eds are nearly identical in structure, with some sentences in Trump’s article appearing almost exactly as they appeared in Carson’s.




http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/19/donald-trump-has-plagiarized-a-lot-of-words.html

 

[Legion Troll]

In April, the Trump campaign began rolling out a new slogan: America First.

“America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” Trump announced in a foreign policy speech.

Unfortunately, “America First” was already claimed in the 1940s, by an American nationalist movement, which—among anti-semitic and isolationist campaigns—encouraged the country to do business with Hitler.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/19/donald-trump-has-plagiarized-a-lot-of-words.html

 

[Legion Troll]

Even before Trump officially launched his presidential campaign, his preparations bore the unlicensed trademarks of plagiarism.

On Nov 11, 2012, six days after President Obama won re-election, Trump filed to trademark the now-infamous campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”

But “Make America Great Again” was a famous slogan in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, employed prominently in everything from buttons to posters to his acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

Trump still takes full credit for the slogan, in March 2015 claiming that “the line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine. I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s now using it, they are all loving it.”





http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/19/donald-trump-has-plagiarized-a-lot-of-words.html

 

[Legion Troll]

Trump’s most flagrant cases of copy-paste appear on Twitter, where he often copies text and images, sometimes from users with names like “WhiteGenocideTM.”

Last July the campaign came under fire for tweeting a picture of marching soldiers, overlaid with an American flag and Trump’s scowling profile.

When Twitter users pointed out that the image of the soldiers was actually lifted from a stock photo of Nazi re-enactors, the Trump campaign blamed an intern.

Even when responding to tragedy, Trump has struggled to generate his own emotions. Following the June mass-shooting in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, Trump tweeted “Reporting that Orlando shooter shouted ‘Allah hu Akbar!’ as he slaughtered clubgoers. 2nd man arrested in LA with rifles near Gay parade.”

Trump’s remark was almost identical to an earlier tweet by Sebastian Gorka. (“Reports coming in: Orlando shooter shouted ‘Allah hu Akbar!’ as he slaughtered clubgoers. 2nd man arrested in LA with rifles nr Gay parade.”)





http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/19/donald-trump-has-plagiarized-a-lot-of-words.html