|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 15 May 2017, two days after President Trump delivered a commencement speech to the graduating class of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, comedian Jimmy Fallon devoted part of his Tonight Show monologue to a video montage comparing snippets from Trump's speech to one given by Reese Witherspoon's character, Elle Woods, in the 2001 comedy Legally Blonde:https://youtu.be/SSLyFiHOC5IThe clip attained instant notoriety, in part because it was reminiscent of a scandal that erupted during the 2016 presidential campaign when Melania Trump gave a speech that borrowed heavily from one Michelle Obama delivered in 2008. A number of media outlets joined the Occupy Democrats Facebook page (above) in sharing the Fallon clip under headlines declaring, with varying degrees of sarcasm, that Trump similarly plagiarized Legally Blonde. Trump's commencement address casts striking similarities to Legally Blonde, noted Daily Mail Online with no detectable sense of irony (and an apparent inability to tell what color hair Donald Trump has): There is no basis in reality for suggesting that Donald Trump copied any part of his speech from Legally Blonde, however. Albeit expertly done for comic effect, Fallon's montage used a very few cherry-picked moments from different parts of Trump's address to create the impression that the president echoed the Reese Witherspoon character's words: Considered in their entireties, there are, in fact, no striking similarities between Trump's 32-minute, 3,800-word address and Witherspoon's Legally Blonde speech, which comprised no more than 100 words and lasted all of 60 seconds on screen: Here is a video of President Trump's Liberty University commencement speech in its entirety:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}