Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump. Like watching a train wreck.
Enjoy.
Reason’s Peter Suderman sums up the spectacle perfectly:
Sarah Palin summed up Donald Trump supporters better than any of us have been able to do so far, I’ll give her that.
In part this is because making sense isn’t really Palin’s style. But it’s also because there is no coherent defense of Donald Trump’s candidacy. His own argument is little more than a simple boast that he will make the country great, like it used to be, followed by a series of insults and a discussion of his poll numbers.
To the extent that he proposes anything resembling actual policies, they tend to be implausible fantasies, designed more as insults and power plays than ideas for governance. His speeches go long on personal boasting, and he dismisses most questions of governance by appealing to his own innate ability to overcome obstaces. You cannot make a reasoned case for Trump, because there is no such case to be made.
Palin’s support was incoherent, then, in part because that’s how she is, and part because it could be no other way. Support for Trump is not based on reason or argument or logic or even a sense of what Trump would actually do as president, but on his personal appeal as a businessman and political entertainer, and a related sense of how and what the country would be. It is not really a political campaign at all, so much as an extended act of fantasy and wish-fulfillment for both him and his supporters.
In a way, then, Palin’s speech was the perfect endorsement for Donald Trump’s campaign: an incoherent mess of angry, resentful sentiment, delivered in a way designed to provide the maximum in media spectacle. Palin effectively—and, okay, somewhat poetically—captured and amplified the identity-politics-driven nonsense that feeds both the candidate and his supporters.
Betcha can’t wait to make America great.
For related articles, see:
Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton on Freedom of Speech – A Side By Side Comparison
Meet the Immigrants Building Trump’s International Hotel in Washington D.C.
Inside Donald Trump’s Relationship with Alleged Pyramid Scheme Company ACN Inc.
Rand Paul Op-ed Blasts Donald Trump – Calls Him a “Fake Conservative” and Wannabe “King”
Will Donald Trump Run as a 3rd Party Candidate?
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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It is unfortunate that both Trump and Palin are working to get Hillary elected. My question is still the same, is there any candidate out there that will pledge to stop over sixty-five years of the abusive application of the state secrets privilege and related doctrine, act, executive order, regulation and related policy abuses?
So now the ghost of Salvador Dali is writing her speeches?
I’ll give her a pass since her son, Track, was being arrested at home for domestic abuse, and he’s had a hard time readjusting to civilian life since returning home from deployment.
Hard as it is to believe, with the current field of plausible candidates on offer to American voters, an avowed socialist is clearly the least risky one to put in the high office of president.
Between the three, Sanders has a record that reflects what the overwhelming number of Americans ask for in polls: peace, prosperity and an end to entitlement for the plutocrats and austerity for the rest of us.
Trump is a luck of the draw candidate. You might get Reagan, you might get Pol Pot. Hillary is so grotesque as to be unmentionable in decent company. So that leaves Bernie. To paraphrase LBJ on Somoza, Bernie may be a socialist but he’s OUR socialist.
Trump has no policy. Everything he does or says is a knee-jerk reaction to something else. He is nothing more than a businessman with something to sell. He tries something (for example, saying that he’ll shut out Muslims, or making a joke about another candidate), checks the crowd’s reaction for marketability, and then either makes that into a product line or abandons it and tries something else. That’s what businesspeople do. Each time he discovers a new kind of red meat that the crowd eats up, he tosses them more. This combination of business strategy and demagoguery has served him well. Trump isn’t what America needs, but he is certainly what America deserves.