There’s almost certainly a joke in the sad reality that Sarah Palin will officially jump onboard the Trump Make-America-Great-Again Express in the town of Ames, Iowa. Ames, you see, is home to the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service National Animal Disease Center (where the most recent “Past Event” listed on the website is “Year one of porcine epidemic diarrhea, what we learned”), but I think I’d rather quit this paragraph before I’m done.
Anyway: the real question isn’t over why Donald Trump is, uh, trumpeting his coveted Palin endorsement – they clearly speak the same language of bombast and Big Gulp to an audience hungry for big government jibes along with their ethanol subsidies (though Palin was opposed).
The question isn’t even: is this a liberal’s ostensible nightmare scenario? Because it kind of is, but we’re still talking about the former governor of Alaska here, and it’s not like she’s going to be his running mate, really. Plus: wouldn’t liberals kind of secretly LOVE it if Palin ran? Wouldn’t Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign team, which could take off the next 292 days?
The real question before the dynamic duo even took the stage was: who does Palin bring in to Camp Trump that he doesn’t already have? Palin, even for many conservatives, represents show(wo)manship over substance – and she isn’t exactly respected on her policy merits.
Or at least, that would be the question if Donald Trump’s entire campaign weren’t geared around maximizing his own press coverage in order to bump up his poll numbers. (You’re reading this, aren’t you?)
Sarah Palin still drags the press (and especially the liberal press – guilty as charged) around by our collective noses. Where Trump and Palin go, so go the television cameras. And that’s reason enough to bring her along the campaign trail, if not appoint her Interior Secretary in the Trump administration’s first term.
