Sarah Palin Announces Run for Congress on April Fool’s Day—But She’s Serious

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and absolute disaster of a presidential running mate, announced on April Fool’s Day her intention to run in the special election for the open U.S. House seat in Alaska, and she appears not to be pranking us. Don Young, the state’s longtime only congressman, lost consciousness while on a flight to Seattle and died three weeks ago on March 18.

“Public service is a calling, and I would be honored to represent the men and women of Alaska in Congress, just as Rep. Young did for 49 years. I realize that I have very big shoes to fill,” Palin said in a statement released Friday night.

In fact, Sarah, no one was calling. The phone was not ringing.

Of course, Palin is coming at this race like she’s running against Fidel Castro. “At this critical time in our nation’s history, we need leaders who will combat the left’s socialist, big-government, America-last agenda,” her statement continued. “This country was built by heroes, and the radical left dishonors their legacies by opening our borders to illegal immigrants, mortgaging our children’s future, and selling out our nation’s interests to the highest bidder.”

If the pandemic and the Trump administration turned your brain to goo, let me refresh you with some of this woman’s greatest hits. The woman can’t name a newspaper she reads. She’s been spewing absolute unintelligible batshit nonsense on her online subscription channel. Her sense of geography was parodied so well that now we only remember the wrong parody. Oh God, Tina Fey will have to go back to Saturday Night Live to revive her impersonation. John McCain is so lucky to be dead.

Even the people who made Palin a household name have renounced her. In an interview for a PBS documentary that premiered earlier this year, Republican operative Steve Schmidt told FRONTLINE that she’s a “serial liar.” “She is the first of a generation of politicians who live in a post-truth environment. She was, and there’s no polite way to say it, but a serial liar,” said Schmidt, a man who helped lead McCain’s presidential run in 2008 and pushed for Palin as a running mate. “She would say things that are simply not true, or things that were picked up from the Internet.”

Palin’s statement announcing her run, appropriately, employs some language one might interpret as parroting support for the January 6 rioters. “I’m in this race to win it and join the fight for freedom alongside other patriots willing to sacrifice all to save our country.”

If Palin can claw her way back into politics, can she do worse damage to our democratic institutions than fellow useful idiot Marjorie Taylor Greene? Only time will tell, but it is a high bar to clear.

Palin’s campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment.