I am sure there are a great many conservatives who were deeply disappointed with Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump Tuesday. It was hard on the ears and harder on the heart. If anything, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump made Ted Cruz look more presidential.
I do question her motives, because while Donald Trump is many things, one thing he most assuredly is not is a conservative. He isn’t. And that was always Palin’s touchstone — true conservatism. Until now.
“I think it [would] be a blow to Sarah Palin, because Sarah Palin has been a champion for the conservative cause, and if she was going to endorse Donald Trump, sadly, she would be endorsing someone who’s held progressive views all their life on the sanctity of life, on marriage, on partial-birth abortion,” Cruz campaign spokesman Rick Tyler said on CNN’s New Day.
Indeed.
Jim Geraghty opines in National Review that Palin’s endorsement of Trump shows, “Maybe the Tea Party isn’t splintered and weak. Maybe it’s dead.” Geraghty notes, “Trump’s an odd figure to win the heart of a public figure once so synonymous with the tea-party movement. He boasts of the influence his money has bought him with politicians, including Charlie Crist, Arlen Specter, and Harry Reid, some of the movement’s biggest enemies. He supported the TARP and auto bailouts and praised socialized medicine. He’s currently touting ethanol subsidies to the rafters in Iowa, and his tax plan would increase the deficit by $10 trillion, according to the Tax Foundation. The day the Tea Party debuted, he praised Obama as ‘a champion.’”
I was an early supporter of Sarah Palin when she was the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008. I liked her a lot. She appeared to be tough, real, and ethical. I thought the RINO establishment and the media did a real number on her. Which is what they do. But she fell short — terribly short. She quit the governorship of Alaska. She quit.
Who quits? What ever happened to, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”? Lord knows that I have been smeared, defamed, and libeled. My good name has been dragged through the mud because of my stand for freedom and against jihad and sharia. I won’t list here the litany of abuse I’ve suffered over the past 15 years for the crime of defending the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the equality of rights of all people before the law, and individual rights. My point is, I would never quit. No matter what.
And so when Palin quit, I just didn’t get it. However, I did have some inkling that she wasn’t what she appeared to be during the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. You recall how I held those enormous rallies against the mosque. I had John Bolton, Andrew Breitbart, Geert Wilders, and a host of other notables speak.
I had asked Sarah Palin to speak, or, if her schedule did not allow her to appear in person, to give us a video or written statement to be read by the 9/11 family members. And she agreed to give us a statement. The 9/11 family members were only too happy to read her statement. I asked her repeatedly for the statement. She never gave it to us. The 9/11 family members were deeply disappointed. The controversy got too hot for her. I think that’s why she quit the governorship. She didn’t have the stones. She turned out to be, when the going got tough, a phony.
The Trump endorsement reeks of opportunism. She thinks he is going to win. She wants on that train.
Ted Cruz holds the conservative position in his opposition to ethanol subsidies, a tough but principled position to take in Iowa. But that’s why Governor Branstad of Iowa came out against Cruz yesterday. Branstad’s son is paid by the ethanol lobby, and has been trailing candidates demanding they support ethanol. Does Sarah Palin support that?
Ted Cruz stood with us after we were attacked by jihadis at our American Freedom Defense Initiative free speech event in Garland, Texas last May. Donald Trump, by contrast, attacked us. Does Sarah Palin support that?
Donald Trump is a big donor to the Clinton Foundation. Does Sarah Palin support that?
Whether Sarah Palin still has the influence in conservative circles that she once did remains to be seen, but I think that her endorsement of Trump damages her far more than it does Cruz.
It shows her unequivocally for what she really is: a phony. And a huge disappointment to free people everywhere.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.