No, Donald Trump Jr. didn't copy portions of his RNC speech
It seemed like a déjà vu all over again at the second night of the Republican National Convention.
On the heels of a plagiarism scandal over portions of Melania Trump's Monday speech -- which appeared to be lifted from a speech Michelle Obama gave in 2008 at the Democratic convention -- Twitter users noted that yet another address from a Trump family member Tuesday night seemed to bear a striking resemblance to a previously published text.
The late-night comics over at "The Daily Show" first noticed some similarities between Donald Trump Jr.'s speech and a column by conservative commentator Frank Buckley, published in May of this year:
This is the portion of the speech in question:
"Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class," Trump told the Cleveland gathering Tuesday. "Now they're 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. For the teachers and administrators, not the students."
Compare that to Buckley's column in The American Conservative:
"The most obvious barrier to mobility is a broken educational system," Buckley wrote. "What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the system's entrenched interests: the teachers' unions and the higher-education professoriate. 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."
But Buckley tweeted Tuesday night about the unattributed comments, saying that in fact this "wasn't stealing."
In a statement to CBS News, Buckley explained: "I was a speechwriter for this speech. So there's not a problem."