rutledge

As a physics professor, I don't receive a lot of expository written work, so this is very rare. I used to accept written reports as extra credit in my general interest courses. There, I would find that about 10% of the written work raised serious issues of uncited referencing. That is a disappointingly high percentage.

That's a good question. I've read much about this. I think an important part of it is, Donald Trump's treatment of Obama political has not been dispassionate criticism --- Trump strongly fought on behalf of the "birther" movement, alleging that Barack Obama was born in Kenya (and so not qualified to be President); he's alleged Obama hates America and is actively, not merely negligently, working to worsen the US's position in the world.

In which case, it would be very surprising that they campaign is using the values expressed in the campaign speeches from Obama, because it would be presumed their values are not the same.

As part of the admission to having plagiarized from Michelle Obama's speech, Meredith McIver had to state that the reason Melania Trump used the passages is because Melania Trump is a long-time admirer of Michelle Obama.

The contrast between those two positions is stark.

Any contrast between public admissions and private behavior in political campaigns raises enormous interest from the press.

I do not agree with any of Trump's positions, and feel in particular that his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist rhetoric (such as when he alleged a Federal Judge was unfit to dispense justice, due to his parents' background as Mexican immigrants creating an inherent bias) are antithetical to American values.

However, my motivation for proving that the plagiarism occurred really came from Manafort's dismissal of the charges of plagiarism. Comparing the two passages directly, or watching the videos side-by-side, made Manafort's dismissal comical. I decided to put a number on it, since it was trivially easy to do so, based on the permutations argument.

The admission by Melania Trump's speechwriter Meredith McIver which you can read here states that Trump read out loud to her from Michelle Obama's speech; McIver then wrote that into the draft. Both of them were aware of the source of the material and its contents.

That sounds to me that they left out any referencing (e.g. "As the current First Lady has observed...") purposely.

I think the controversy that erupted has less to do with the ethics of proper citation, and the underlying meaning of this specific instance: paragraphs in a Trump political speech were substantially based on their electoral opponents (and political opponents). Revealing such facts, is why an ethics of proper citation exists.

So far, effectively none. There might have been 1-2 snarky comments on my twitter feed, but if they are there, the intensity was sufficiently low that I didn't notice it.

EDIT: Here is the first, and it's from a Redditor