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Photo via iDntGetCurved_/Twitter

Donald Trump didn’t plagiarize ‘Bee Movie’ in his inauguration speech

Though... it sounds plausible.

 

Samantha Grasso

Internet Culture

Posted on Jan 21, 2017   Updated on May 25, 2021, 4:04 am CDT

President Donald Trump has been one very busy bee—at least, that is according to this meme alleging that, yes, the 45th president of the U.S. knowingly plagiarized part of his inauguration speech from the internet favorite Bee Movie.

iDntGetCurved_/Twitter

Yep, Twitter has fused its love of Bee Movie memes and poking fun at our new president into one meme, posing a universe in which Trump has not only seen the children’s movie—which came out when his youngest son Barron was but a toddler—but also made the conscious decision to base his speech off the musings of Jerry Seinfeld‘s Barry B. Benson.

https://twitter.com/iDntGetCurved_/status/822617669451075585

https://twitter.com/thisbemesara/status/822691303284736000

WillMcAvoyACN/Twitter

https://twitter.com/ShiWantsTheC/status/822643172056690688

https://twitter.com/paulythegun/status/822580209601970176

I’ll admit that when I saw this meme myself, I knew, I knew that it wasn’t legit. But still, there was a part of me that thought, in the back of my mind, that Trump is an unprecedented president whose speech also sounded like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. Who’s to say? I had to investigate.

Spoiler alert: Trump (or more so his co-speech writers and advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller) did not, in fact, plagiarize Bee Movie. While Trump did say the “we are one nation and their pain is our pain” bit in his speech, no such thing is uttered in Bee Movie

Still, that doesn’t make this fake Trump/Benson gaffe any less amusing.

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*First Published: Jan 21, 2017, 1:56 pm CST