Sarah Palin introducing Donald Trump at a campaign event Monday in Iowa.
Sarah Palin has been
mocked a lot for the way she talks, especially in her strange and rambling
endorsement speech for Donald Trump. But her speeches on the campaign trail
aren’t simple; they are actually incredibly complicated.
Her unusual style was
on display at a Trump rally on Monday afternoon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “When
both parties, the machines involved, when both of them hate you,” she said at
one point, “then you know America loves you and we do love he who will be the next
president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump!”
Let’s break that last
part down: “We” love not just Donald Trump, or even just Donald J. Trump, but
“he who will be the next president of the United States of America.”
Mrs. Palin relies heavily
on this particular kind of dependent clause. “He is one who would know to
negotiate,” she said of Donald Trump in her speech endorsing him on Jan. 19.
Later in that speech, she spoke of “our own G.O.P. machine, the establishment,
they who would assemble the political landscape.”
Mrs. Palin is also a
big fan of the participial phrase. “And that blank check too,” she said on
Monday, “making no sense because it’s led us to things, oh gosh, to pay the
bills then, we have had to uh, print money out of thin air.”
In this case “making no
sense” and everything that follows appear to modify “blank check”; though it
can be a little hard to tell with Mrs. Palin, the participial phrase seems to
function as an adjective. Elsewhere in her speech Mrs. Palin got more
sophisticated.
“Politics being kind of
brutal business,” she said, “you find out who your friends are, that’s for
sure.”
Here, “politics being
kind of brutal business” defines the circumstances under which the action
occurs. It looks like a construction that will be familiar to anybody who took
Latin in school: the ablative absolute.
An ablative absolute in
Latin is a particular kind of clause that, according to one definition,
“modifies the whole sentence as an adverb modifies the action of a verb.” An
example, courtesy of The Latin Library: “His verbis dictis, Caesar discedit.”
Translation: “With these words having been said, Caesar departs.”
In fact, a lot of what
Sarah Palin says sounds like it’s been poorly translated from the Latin. With
her “he who” and “one who,” she’d sound almost Ciceronian if it weren’t for the
holes in her logic and the way those complicated sentences sometimes dribble
off into vaguely sinister, possibly offensive nonsense.
Maybe Mrs. Palin or her
speechwriters think the convoluted sentence structure makes her sound smart.
Maybe they think it makes her sound heroic, like the orators of the past. Or
maybe all those extra clauses are just a really good way to load up a sentence
with praise — or insults. Here’s Mrs. Palin using both a dependent clause and a
participial phrase to attack President Obama on Jan.
And he, who would
negotiate deals, kind of with the skills of a community organizer maybe
organizing a neighborhood tea, well, he deciding that, “No, America would
apologize as part of the deal,” as the enemy sends a message to the rest of the
world that they capture and we kowtow, and we apologize, and then, we bend over
and say, “Thank you, enemy.”
I honestly am not sure
what’s going on in this sentence. What I do know is that Sarah Palin has this
in common with Roman orators: She loves to talk trash.
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