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Man alive, you’d think that after Melania Trump’s still-extraordinary plagiarism debacle on Monday night, the Trump family would be, like, extra-extra-careful when it comes to even the appearance of appropriation. Hah, just kidding—since when is the Trump campaign careful about anything? So you were not alone if you felt an intense sense of déjà vu when the Daily Show put Donald Trump Jr.'s speech under the microscope and found that one jarring passage contained a striking similarity to a paragraph in a column in the American Conservative written by one F.H. Buckley.
Trump, just 38 years old, invoked an odd metaphor involving a nation that disappeared off the face of the Earth when he was a lad of 13:
"Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they are stalled on the ground floor. They're like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers.”
Wrote Buckley in May:
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.
Did we—could we possibly—have another live one on our hands? Not quite. Buckley (under a Twitter account with the username “Frank Buckley”) cryptically wrote, “Except it wasn’t stealing...” and would tweet no more, but he soon spoke with some media outlets and declared he was “principal speechwriter” for Trump the Younger. So Buckley, it would seem, stole from himself—something he’s done before: He also used the “elevator” line in a piece in the National Review two years ago. He really couldn’t come up with fresh material for such an important event?
It’s not a good look for a clan that’s been absolutely reeling over its matriarch’s theft of some eloquent words spoken by our nation’s first lady. You’d think F.H. Buckley might have warned someone before his speech was loaded into the teleprompter, but I guess he got stuck in that elevator. Next time, try the stairs.