Sarah Palin Is Threatening to Re-Enter Politics

One of the very present horrors in listening to the first and second seasons of “Slow Burn”—the Slate podcast that revisits political scandals—is realizing that all of the villains we have now are the same ones we had three decades ago. In other words: We’ll probably be stuck with many of the politicians we hate for most of our lifetimes.

It is at this point that I must break the bad news and say that Sarah Palin may very well be one of them. According to the Guardian, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate has been weighing a 2022 Senate run.

“If God wants me to do it I will,” Palin said while in conversation with Ché Ahn, a famous conservative pastor. “I would say you guys [the audience] better be there for me this time, because a lot of people were not there for me last time.”

Palin would hypothetically be challenging longtime incumbent Lisa Murkowski, popularly thought of as a swing vote for Democrats, despite this rarely being the case. Palin, no doubt, is a much worse alternative, though it seems unlikely to me that Republican voters would indeed be “there for [her] this time” at the ballot box to vote her in. So again, we’re in the realm of the extremely hypothetical.

Nonetheless the mere possibility fills me with dread. In the last year, both Lara Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have announced bids for political office—Lara Trump for North Carolina Senate, and Sanders for Arkansas governor—prompting me to write the headlines “Please No” and “Oh God, Please No,” respectively. The suggestion that Palin might also throw her hat in the ring inspires similar feelings—a weariness at seeing the same faces in conservative politics over and over again.

Though Lara Trump has since made clear she would not be running in 2022, recently she took care to remind us that her Senate bid is a “no for now, not no forever.” She’ll return I’m sure; they all do.