Quite the rhetorician, Sarah Palin. It reminds Anna North of ancient Roman trash talk. One might say to her and to Trump what Cicero said to the conspirator Lucius Catilina in the Senate of the ancient Roman Republic:
"When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?"
Marcus Tullius Cicero - First Oration against Lucius Catilina
Sarah Palin’s English - The New York Times
by Anna North
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.”
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