Republicans are resorting to My Little Pony quotes to defend Melania Trump's plagiarism

Did you wake up this morning expecting to hear that RNC communications director and chief strategist Sean Spicer used a quote from Twilight Sparkle of My Little Pony to defend Melania Trump against accusations of plagiarizing Michelle Obama?

Right. Well. Let's back up.

Melania Trump was accused of copying approximately two paragraphs of the convention speech Michelle Obama gave in 2008; due to the number of similar or exact phrases that the speeches share, the Washingtonian found that the odds of Melania Trump or her speechwriters "accidentally" using the same words in the same order that Obama did are less than one in a trillion.

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Nevertheless, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort argued that Melania was simply using "common words," and that the relation between the two speeches was merely coincidental. Spicer apparently tried to hammer that point home by illustrating that if you dig hard enough, you can find similarities between Melania Trump's speech and totally irrelevant things, like My Little Pony:

Even Spicer looks embarrassed to have made that argument.