My friend Geoffrey Dunn knows what's up with the Trump/Palin flirtation.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

Donald Trump is many things -- a demagogue and a pompous blowhard, a braggart and a race baiter -- but in the end, he's nobody's fool, except perhaps his own. Thus, his recent lauding of Sarah Palin and his hiring of her former Chief of Staff reveal that Trump's campaign for the presidency is, ultimately, more of a circus act than it is a serious endeavor for the White House. If Trump were really serious, he'd be keeping the quitter governor at bay.

Geoffrey gives a number of examples to prove Trump's similarity to Palin, and that he is not serious about a run for the GOP nomination.

Ultimately he sums it up thusly:

Ever since her first announcement as John McCain's running mate in August of 2008, and the very brief honeymoon period she was graced with after, Palin's national favorability ratings have continued to plummet. Trump must know that he's facing the same ignoble outcome--the presidency will never be his. 

As with Palin, who hinted at a third-party run four years ago, Trump is flashing a similar wild card. It's a threat directed specifically at the Republican Party. He has the resources and, perhaps more significantly, the ego to do it. He will never win the Republican nomination for the presidency--bet any amount of money on that--but he might well cost them the White House in 2016 with a third-party run (and with La Palin riding shotgun). It will be a media circus like no other--yet another of their reality TV shows fueled by this country's sick celebrity fetishism. 

Trump's vicious attacks on John McCain--and Palin's implicit criticism of McCain as well--have illustrated that there is no low to which our modern-day Bonnie and Clyde will not stoop. A third-party run is not out of the question. They are both narcissists at heart--and the ongoing media attention they would receive is what really propels their egomaniacal political agenda.

Geoffrey understands Sarah Palin about as well as anybody, and much better than most.

He wrote the 2011 book "The Lies of Sarah Palin" and his research revealed things about the former governor of Alaska that ultimately proved to him, and anybody who read his book, that Palin was NEVER going to be a politician on a national level.

He still e-mails me occasionally and we commiserate on our shared battle scars and then share a laugh that this now humiliated woman was once considered by some as a viable candidate for the presidency.

Which is an indication of yet one more thing that she and Donald Trump will soon have in common.