Column: Palin paved the way for Trump’s campaign, presidency | Columnists | #alaska | #politics

Though Palin has not been in elected office since resigning as governor in 2009, her influence has been felt in the years since. Her populist approach has been echoed by Trump and others, as I wrote in last week’s column. The similarities between Palin and Trump are striking. This week I will further explore how Palin’s 2008 vice presidential candidacy served as a precursor to Trump’s 2016 presidential run. Next week I will examine important ways in which Trump has gone beyond Palin’s populism.

There is, it seems, something about her. It is hard to put one’s finger on it. But Palin has a magnetic draw.

When she was selected as John McCain’s running mate, critics compared Palin to Dan Quayle. She was someone who was viewed by detractors as being too inexperienced and ill-prepared, and perhaps not smart enough, to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

But Palin differed from Quayle in an important way. She had the “it” factor.

The American public could not look away. “Even in Manhattan, where celebrity sightings were as common as discarded pizza boxes, the Alaska governor was a show stealer,” journalists and Palin biographers Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe wrote. Palin, “had joined a short list of celebrities who did not need to try to get noticed.”

She attracted large numbers of enthusiastic fans to her campaign rallies. “I was a little surprised myself,” Palin humblebragged in her memoir. “This was a rock concert-sized crowd. Some football stadiums didn’t hold that many people.”

Palin received outsized attention in part because, like Trump, she had an edge of unpredictability. She was direct and unfiltered, more “authentic” than the “typical politician.”

But when she became a nationally prominent public figure as the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president, she had, she felt, an increasingly difficult time getting her message out due to her contentious relationship with the media.

It had not always been that way.

While governor of Alaska, Palin had gotten along well with the press. In her memoir, she described the Alaskan media as decent and fair during her first years in office. “I had a great relationship with those guys,” Palin wrote in reference to local reporters with whom she shared her cellphone number. Close contact with the media was how we operated, she said. It helped us govern.

This was undoubtedly partly a function of the media’s generally favorable coverage of her and her governorship. “She has this very natural magnetism, I think, and I was really drawn to her,” Alaskan journalist Rebecca Braun has commented. Palin was admired among journalists for her willingness to take on Alaska’s political establishment by pursuing ethics reform. She sought to hold elected officials accountable, as idealistic journalists similarly seek to do through different means.

Though Palin initially had a symbiotic relationship with the media, things changed after she was selected to be McCain’s running mate. Palin felt that the media coverage during her vice presidential campaign was biased and misleading. The press misreported on things such as her views on censorship and sex education, she felt. Though she took some responsibility for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric, Palin felt that Couric, like most others in media, was out to get a “gotcha” moment.

During her vice presidential campaign, Palin was kept at arm’s length from national reporters. The McCain campaign feared that her political inexperience would lead to unscripted errors. Republican Party headquarters tried to keep her from engaging with the media beyond parroting approved campaign messages. It created a distance between Pain and the press that later proved to be unbridgeable.

One of Palin’s strengths as a politician is her ability to connect with others during unscripted moments. She felt increasingly hemmed in and frustrated by what she viewed as being micromanaged. When she said, contrary to the campaign strategy of moving on from Michigan (after it appeared that they would not win there), that she did not want to pull out of the state, she was characterized by Republican operatives as having “gone rogue.”

Palin’s relationship with the local press in Alaska was not the same after she returned from her vice presidential run. She was unfairly characterized, she believed, as focusing too much on national politics and not enough on the concerns of her Alaskan constituents. The framing of her pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey in which she was in the foreground of turkeys being decapitated was, she felt, indicative of the way media coverage of her had changed.

Palin’s denunciation of the media became strident. She did a lengthy interview with conservative filmmaker John Ziegler during which she harshly criticized the media and its coverage of her vice presidential campaign. During her resignation speech as governor, she chided the press to “quit makin’ things up.”

Palin’s criticism of what she now called the ‘”lame-stream media” was later echoed by Trump in his labeling of the press as “the enemy of the people” and his exhortations against what he called “fake news.” Though she was not the first conservative politician to allege media bias, Palin amplified criticism of the press to an extent that few other prominent public officials had to that point.

Social media was still in its relative infancy at the beginning of Palin’s career in the national spotlight. Nonetheless, once she resigned as governor, she found liberation in “speaking directly to the people” online through Facebook. “From this tiny apartment, I watched debates unfold in Washington, and I used my Facebook page to call things like I saw them,” she wrote at the end of her memoir.

Palin’s use of social media was a harbinger of things to come. “As Palin’s distrust of the media became complete, her decision to work around it using Twitter and Facebook became an innovative concept,” journalists Conroy and Walshe noted. “After all, her success in getting her tweets and Facebook posts cited frequently in mainstream media accounts was impressive.”

Trump similarly used social media, particularly Twitter as a way to communicate directly with voters when running for president and during his time in office.

While governor, in what became known as “Troopergate,” Palin was accused of firing Alaskan Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he did not respond to pressure to fire her ex-brother-in-law, State Trooper Mike Wooten. Wooten had gone through a messy divorce with Palin’s sister, Molly.

When Palin was on the 2008 campaign trail, as a result of an inquiry launched by the bipartisan Alaskan Legislative Council, independent investigator Stephen Branchflower released a report stating that Palin had abused her power as governor in firing Monegan. The report also stated that there were reasons besides Wooten that Monegan was fired, and that it was not against the law for Palin, as governor, to fire him.

Palin, in response to the report, claimed that she had been cleared not only of legal wrongdoing, but also, falsely, of “any hint of any kind of unethical activity.” “In one sweeping sentence,” Conroy and Walshe wrote, “the governor flatly asserted that Branchflower’s report, which said, that Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, had actually found just the opposite.” The Anchorage Daily News referred to Palin’s statement as an Orwellian “big lie.”

The similarity between Palin’s response to Branchflower’s report and Trump’s response to the Mueller report (into alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia) is striking. Though Mueller’s report stated “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” Trump tweeted in response that there had been “Total EXONERATION.”

Palin also has promoted conspiracy theories. During her vice presidential campaign, she alleged that Obama “pals around with terrorists,” playing into fears promoted by “birthers” such as Trump that Obama was a foreign born Muslim. She later claimed that Obamacare would lead to the establishment of bureaucratic “death panels.”

Trump, along with expressing doubt over whether Obama was born in the United States, has promoted numerous conspiracy theories, including that vaccines cause autism, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered someone, and the father of Ted Cruz had ties to the Kennedy assassination.

Palin and Trump share several additional similarities. Both are outwardly confident, though thin-skinned which has resulted in disproportionate fury in reaction to slights. Just as Trump privileges loyalty (particularly in relation to his claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”) in his political relationships, “personal loyalty was one of the most valued commodities” that Palin judged members of her team on while governor, according to Conroy and Walshe.

Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 in many ways appeared unprecedented. Never before, it seemed, had the United States had a politician like him. But Palin, eight years earlier, had in several ways paved the way for Trump’s populist takeover.

Both are currently out office. Yet with Palin running for Alaska’s open congressional seat and Trump likely to run for president in 2024, both may soon be returning to Washington. Whether or not they succeed will have a significant impact on determining the nature of the GOP and the climate of national politics for years to come.