Remember 2016? Remember the outrage from a Daily Beast dossier on the Trump’s egregious plagiarism? Let’s recount.
Oh how the times fly.
…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.
Lazy incompetence was not hard to see.
On its Idaho webpage, the campaign copied and pasted local 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Not only had the article been plagiarized, it was also advertised out-of-date voter information.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 like the Trump really thinks he can steal without accountability.
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.”
The Trump fraudulently claimed that he alone in 2012 invented the phrase that Ronald Reagan had very loudly used in a presidential campaign on the 1980 GOP main stage:
…a great national crusade to make America great again.
It’s right there, obvious for everyone to see why and how the Trump stole from others.
Moving on, the heart of the problem perhaps is related to thirst for illegitimate power. Stealing is a symptom of unfair competition practiced among Americans known to embrace hate.
…perhaps 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. …[and those] celebrating the death of a noted Holocaust survivor.
The conclusive remark on Trump’s plagiarism should have unequivocally been “America First.” Historically, this phrase carries a toxic and racist connotation, tracing back to the “nativist” anti-immigrant politics of the late 1800s. It’s crucial to remember that President Woodrow Wilson revived the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1915, adopting the racist slogan “America First.” However, contemporary perceptions often link this slogan only to Hitler posing a genocidal global threat, unfortunately overlooking more than 100 years of racist violent domestic terrorist groups in America continuously using the phrase to express hate.
“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.
The Trump calling himself America First thus wasn’t trying to hide the hate, but he of course eliminated attribution. There is no evidence he didn’t mean to continue the absolute most racist things by stealing the KKK phrase, while pretending the words were his. He may as well have been brazenly copying Hitler speeches and claiming them to be his own.
In other words, Trump’s response when criticized for using Hitler’s language was to acknowledge the criticism and then to use it again.
This plagiarist guy. He literally stole from Reagan, KKK, and Hitler. Could he be any more racist?
He goes around saying what Hitler said, while trying to take credit for it as if he’s the first guy to ever think up Nazism.
Hitler said what? Mein who?
…it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew,” Trump told Brenner. Brenner then asked Marty Davis whether he gave Trump a copy of the book. “I did give him a book about Hitler,’ Davis told her. “But it was ‘My New Order,’ Hitler’s speeches, not ‘Mein Kampf.’ I thought he would find it interesting. … but I’m not Jewish.”
Hitler not Hitler. Order not Order. Jewish not Jewish. Whatever, truth seems irrelevant to the Trump as he insults and attacks Americans with his piles of lies, let alone “art of the steal” habits of corrupt plunder.
…stealing ancient Israeli artifacts isn’t surprising. Trump all but ransacked the White House on his way out of office, most notably absconding with hundreds of classified documents.
Is there any limit to the audacity? Perhaps the next will be Trump asserting ownership of a supposedly newly invented holiday by him, called Hanukkah, demanding payment from anyone who celebrates. The blatant and disgraceful abuse of public office, coupled with a history of shameless plagiarism as evident in repeated unapologetic copying, makes one wonder if his anti-American sentiments should ever be unexpected.
[The Trump’s 2017] statement, released about 34 minutes after Exxon put out its announcement, copied a full paragraph from Exxon’s statement… Trump heavily complimented Exxon, which was most recently run by his appointment to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson…
If there was genuine concern about high-profile plagiarism, as extensively documented by the Daily Beast in their report, the Trump always should have been a primary focus of scrutiny. It seems inconceivable that someone with such a history of lies, cheats and theft could have met qualifications to compete for any public or private office.