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Months ago, Lawrence O’Donnell correctly predicted the day on which Donald Trump would admit he was not running for president — that day, May 16, being the deadline for NBC’s announcement that they had picked up Trump’s reality show for another year. The fact that the show is the network’s top rated primetime show (or at least it was before the Donald aligned himself with the racist birther movement) should have been made it cinch that Trump never had any intention of running — that it was all a big publicity ploy.
And, if stories that NBC upped his salary to $60 million are true, as publicity ploys go, Trump’s fake presidential aspirations were stunningly effective.
Now O’Donnell has turned his sights on Sarah Palin. He reminds us that on March 2, Fox president Roger Ailes fired all the pols on his network who were seriously considering running for president. Palin and Mike Huckabee were not among them.
What is really going on here is that Palin — who has reportedly raked in $20 million since she abruptly quit her job as governor of Alaska — is in it strictly for the money. The minute she officially announces that she is not running, she becomes a non-entity. The crowds disappear, deals for books and TV shows evaporate.
Palin was forced to go dark (meaning restrict her publicity-seeking efforts to Fox) for a few months this year after her disastrous response to the shooting in January of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — Palin, you’ll recall, could not resist making herself the biggest victim of a tragedy in which six people were killed, including a federal judge and nine-year-old girl, and 13 were wounded, including Giffords.
That time out of the non-Fox limelight has hurt her earning power — and that’s what this current “bus trip” is about, and nothing more.
So don’t be fooled by the speculation in what she would call the lamestream media. She ain’t running for president — and this will remain true until the day Roger Ailes gives her a pink slip and sends her packing.
Yeah, I’ve been saying this for HOW long now?
The only place where Palin is a viable political force is in the media. And the media loves because she says dopey things. What she DOESN’T do is say anything to inspire any policy changes. So she’s safe and hilarious. This is not much different from a professional wrestler (And I don’t mean Ludwig Borgia or Jesse Ventura, I mean wrestler who HAVEN’T run for political office). She engages in the kind of speech known in professional wrestling as ‘cheap pops’ and ‘cheap heat’.
If she wants to get the crowd to cheer, she mentions that particular town or Ronald Reagan (cheap pop). If she wants them to boo, she mentions San Fransico (or Washington) or Nancy Pelosi (cheap heat).
The only reason I can think of that she would declare that she’s running for POTUS is so that she can use SarahPAC money to pay for her Arizona house, which she would use as a campaign base.