![]() My worst nightmare is sending the person I work for on stage with remarks that are less than perfect: a mistake that the press will seize on, or a joke that falls flat. It’s a direct insult to the American public that the Trump campaign is so sloppy and has such shoddy work ethic that they put so little effort into preparing a woman who might be First Lady of our country for the most major public speech she would ever deliver. Trump surrogates parroting “common words and phrases” as a defense must think the American public is truly moronic-yes, the speech included nearly 60 of the same words, arranged exactly the same way. ![]() How painful that his wife Melania is the first casualty of that oversight. It’s clear Trump never bothered to find such a person. ![]() Since speechwriters should by definition work quietly, in the background (a notion disregarded by the Obama administration’s celebrity speechwriter cabal), a ghostwriter who might be ashamed to be publicly affiliated with Trump could stay in the shadows. A talented writer could take the gig and avoid the Trump affiliation. Since the Trump campaign also has no coherent policy, a speechwriter could literally chart the policy course of the campaign. Which brings me back to Trump, and the artist his campaign clearly does not employ. You need speechwriters who are concerned by the art of the speech to have their work checked by a closely managed list of aides who actually have something to contribute to a specific set of remarks. There has to be leadership from a strong communications chief to stop it. Those mistakes become far more pronounced when you have a team of political hacks eager to cram in their additions to a speech just so that they are part of the process. ![]() When the speechwriting process is open to everyone, mistakes are inevitable. Speechwriting demands a managed process that can still allow for creativity. If there is one constant in political speechwriting, it’s that 99 percent of speechwriting mistakes are process mistakes, not nefarious cheating. It was all-hands-on-deck inside the speechwriting office a full month before a State of the Union, with staffers running down every last fact about obscure policies that would make it into the most comprehensive (and by nature un-eloquent) address of the year. Hundreds of Bush staffers have the same signed copies-because that’s how many people worked on any major address. I have five State of the Union speeches signed by President Bush that I have framed in the wall of my office. That’s a throwaway example of the efforts that go into a stump speech. Read next: How Not to Get Accused of Plagiarism Like Melania Trump I had just joined the office and was reviewing an annotated draft and noticed that for a speech that was to be delivered in Maine a Kennebunkport reference was annotated to note that the Bush family had a home there for over a hundred years, and that the President had spent significant parts of his childhood there. The Bush White House had a fact-checking process that annotated every single fact in a speech. There can’t be any accidents when you are playing the game at the very top. That’s why there’s a thorough process to stop any mistakes. The best writers tend to be incredibly well read, so unconscious plagiarism inspired from the greats can happen. I remember a senior speechwriter having a young aide run down a three-word phrase a day or two before the second inaugural address, just to make absolutely sure he hadn’t accidentally lifted it from memory. In the White House, staffers spent hours and hours and hours parsing speech text to detect even the slightest of accidental similarities.
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