Sarah Palin officially endorses Donald Trump, ‘Can I get a hallelujah’
The former GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin offered a passionate endorsement on Tuesday to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, the reality TV star-turned-politician, declaring that “the status quo has got to go.”
Palin, a former Alaska governor who was Republican Senator John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 election won by Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden, appeared with Trump at a rally in Ames, Iowa, two weeks before the state’s Feb. 1 caucus, the country’s first nominating process ahead of the Nov. 8 election.
“He is from the private sector, not a politician,” Palin said in an animated speech after joining the business mogul and former host of TV’s The Apprentice onstage. “Can I get a hallelujah?”
Palin said there was nothing wrong with Trump being a multibillionaire and that it did not make him an elitist, citing all the time he had spent with construction workers as a real-estate developer.
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As Trump stood alongside, Palin said: “The status quo has got to go,” adding that the political establishment had been “wearing political correctness kind of like a suicide vest.”
In a statement before the event, Trump said he was “greatly honored” by the endorsement. “She is a friend, and a high-quality person whom I have great respect for.”
Trump is in a close race in Iowa with Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Palin’s role is to lean conservative and evangelical Christians who have been influential in Iowa primaries.
Cruz responded to her switch of allegiance with magnanimity.
“Regardless of what she does in 2016,” he tweeted, “I will always be a big fan.”
She devoted a large portion of her speech to deflecting criticism from Cruz and others that Trump, who did not oppose legal abortion at least for a time, was not a true conservative.
Since resigning her governorship in 2009, Palin has worked as a conservative political commentator and as the producer and star of lightly staged television shows about her large family enjoying Alaska’s rugged landscapes.
Joe Brettell, a Republican strategist in Texas, said he thought Palin would not help Trump much “beyond a jolt in the news cycle.”
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