Trump and Palin: Far right was asking for it
Sarah Palin, in a zany, rambling endorsement announcement filled with garbled syntax and malapropisms, endorsed front-runner Donald Trump on Tuesday in Iowa.
The Washington Post reported, “’No more pussyfootin’ around. Our troops deserve the best! You deserve the best,’ she told the crowd. ‘... I’m here to support the next president of the United States: Donald Trump!’” It seems a match made in heaven between the two celebrities, although Trump seemed miffed she spoke for so long. So how did we get to this point?
In some ways the Donald Trump-Sarah Palin team is the perfect comeuppance to the far-right – including the loudest talk show hosts, the anti-immigrant propagandists, the inside-the-Beltway groups that make money from political chaos and the pols who take advantage of all of those voices, politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
The far-right did all in their power to undermine compromise, to promote know-nothingism on immigration and to root for government failure (as in the 2013 shutdown). Beltway groups, armed with score cards and vitriol, demeaned anyone but those like the Freedom Caucus, those who had no responsibility for governance and no risk of electoral defeat.
Palin, long after she revealed herself to be an unserious populist and the 2008 election was in the rear-view mirror, was still heralded by the far-right as the warrior against the MSM and liberal elites more generally. She was the queen bee at gatherings like CPAC. Her admirers insisted she, not Republican lawmakers trying to govern, had the pulse of the public.
Then along comes Donald Trump. Many (but not the Beltway groups) rushed to his side as well. He was right – they insisted! – about Muslims, immigration and foreign policy (a weird brew of isolationism, bombast and infatuation with dictators). Once again he was slaying inside-the-Beltway Republicans, whom the far-right was convinced were indistinguishable from Democrats. So what if he embraced protectionism and disdain for civil liberties? His past Democratic dalliances were of no consequence.
Cruz, it seems, made the same error many establishment politicians and the MSM did: He underestimated Trump and instead of under-cutting him from the start, helped defend him and perpetuate the media hoopla. Now it’s hard to take Cruz’s complaints about the real estate mogul seriously.
It seems the far-right noise machine, which lacks a conservative temperament and adherence to thoughtful positions, has met its enemies – its own creations in the persons of Trump and Palin and in voters and listeners so unmoored to reality and inured to reason that Cruz’s attempt to dissect Trump’s proposals falls on deaf ears.
So which is it – is Palin a know-nothing nut with no grasp of conservative principles or the Joan of Arc of the right wing? How can Cruz be preferable to Trump if so many of these voices had argued for months that Trump was right on China, the Iraq War and so much more? Oh my, what talk radio hysterics have wrought!
While that faction of the GOP is figuring out its standard bearer, the rest of the party had better figure out its strongest horse sooner rather than later. Once they rally around a viable, responsible figure they can go about the business of defeating the winner of the Cruz-Trump scrum.
This story was originally published January 20, 2016 at 5:36 PM with the headline "Trump and Palin: Far right was asking for it."