Back in the before times of January 2015, when I was a reporter for CNN, I did a weekend live shot from the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, one of those political cattle calls where Republican presidential hopefuls take turns onstage professing their Christian faith before a crowd of people harvested from a Grant Wood painting, hoping to impress the state’s conservative activists. Most of the supposedly serious 2016 contenders had flown to Iowa: Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee. But the CNN anchor that day, Michael Smerconish, asked me a reasonable question about two attention-grabbing Republicans who were also there, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, and whether they might run for president too. Like most Very Savvy political journalists at the time, I laughed off Trump’s appearance as just another thirsty White House tease. And having covered Palin up close since she was chosen as John McCain’s running mate, I knew her best shot at the Republican nomination was back in 2012.
Soon after the segment aired, CNN president Jeff Zucker, who is always watching, emailed me and a few other producers demanding that we not cover Trump or Palin, explaining that both Republicans were carnival acts, attention-seekers, two unserious distractions from the real presidential race to come. At the time, few in politics would have disagreed. I think about that moment from time to time, and not just because CNN’s position on covering Trump so famously changed once he actually became a candidate, delivering ratings galore. But the Iowa story is worth remembering, too, because of the way Trump and Palin were lumped together by the smart set as little more than a sad and desperate right-wing sideshow, when in truth, they were two of the most consequential political figures in American history.
These days Palin has receded to a historical footnote and a punch line for a news media that’s become even more cocooned in its urban bubble since 2008, with Trump now receiving most of the credit for upending the presumed order of national politics. But it was Palin who opened the door for Trump, the first politician to fuse together backlash politics and anti-elitism with the mighty American power of celebrity. “The impact that she has had on rejuvenating almost the Republican Party, it’s been unbelievable,” Trump said of Palin in 2008, soon after she was picked from obscurity to join McCain on the ticket. After McCain lost, Palin resigned from the governorship in Alaska but continued to gather strength as a fixture on the conservative political circuit, publishing a best-selling memoir, headlining Tea Party rallies, joining Fox News, and coming close to running for president in 2012. And she did most of it while bypassing the “lamestream” media by posting her musings and rants on Facebook for an enormous community of die-hard fans.
Like Trump, Palin had powers beyond the campaign trail: She wore a celebrity halo rarely seen on a politician. Her traveling circus in the fall of 2008 proudly embraced redneck America, Hank Williams Jr. and Gretchen Wilson, hunting and fishing, Carhartts and Walmart. Her crowds were rapturous. Rural Americans and working people who didn’t go to college saw her as one of their own, while liberals and journalists loved to mock her lack of sophistication and manner of speaking. It was a partisan culture clash that only gave Palin more strength. Tina Fey’s scornful impression of Palin on Saturday Night Live was only the beginning. After Palin came on the scene, as Nancy Isenberg recounted in her book White Trash, a history of class in America, Hollywood unleashed a crop of new TV shows that played off the redneck trope that Palin ushered into the mainstream: Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Redneck Island, Duck Dynasty, Moonshiners, Appalachian Outlaws. Her family dramas became tabloid favorites. And Palin would go on, fittingly, to star in her own reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, produced by Mark Burnett, Trump’s beloved reality-show producer.
Barack Obama later wrote in his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, that Palin’s explosive rise was “a sign of things to come, a larger, darker reality in which partisan affiliation and political expedience would threaten to blot out everything—your previous positions, your stated principles, even what your own senses, your eyes and ears, told you to be true.” More than any politician that came before her, Palin made politics purely about cultural identity—and there would be no turning back. Obama left readers to draw the obvious comparison to Trump. Whether Trump was watching closely or not, Palin carved out a new path to power. And now, in his postpresidency, Trump’s future might also look a lot like Palin’s. Out of the White House and essentially deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook, Trump is inhabiting something of a media time warp, now much more dependent on traditional media for attention. He’s still the hottest story in the world, but Palin’s moment in the sun, which began more than a decade ago, offers a possible glimpse into how the next few years will unfold for the former president—and how his hold on Republican politics and the media, which seems overpowering today, will fade with time.
Between 2009 and 2011, Mitch McConnell might have controlled the official levers of GOP politics in Washington, but no Republican occupied the public consciousness more than Sarah Palin. The country might have had its first Black president in office, grappling with seismic economic distress, but Palin was the entertainer in chief. Her face was splattered on magazines, on cable and broadcast news, on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on Oprah and CBN, on Facebook and Twitter, on weirdo fan blogs and international news sites alike. She was inescapable. In 2009, my colleague Michael Calderone wrote for Politico about the “Palin-media codependency,” noting that Andrea Mitchell had hosted her MSNBC show from a Barnes & Noble in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Palin was scheduled to stop on her book tour for Going Rogue. That year Andrew Sullivan blogged about Palin more than 24 times in two days for The Atlantic. National Review launched a blog dedicated solely to observing Palin. The Huffington Post helped usher in the “outraged fact check” genre, with “The 18 Biggest Falsehoods in Palin’s book” driving plenty of clicks. Palin sat down for a big exclusive with Barbara Walters, with ABC dripping out teaser clips across Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Nightline. She was inescapable.
As the Tea Party movement forced its way into the national conversation, she emerged as its de facto standard-bearer. Political pundits were at once confounded and bewitched. Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard placed Palin’s defiant anti-intellectualism in the tradition of American populism. Maureen Dowd wrote that “Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power.” Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, celebrated her ability to trigger know-it-all political reporters. Any of this sound familiar? Her arrival in politics came just as the legacy news media was succumbing to its current social media addiction, but Palin held attentional singularity, commanding clicks and TV ratings alike. In 2010, my colleague Gabriel Sherman wrote in New York that no politician in history had “marketed herself over multiple platforms with the sophistication and sheer ambitiousness that Palin has shown.” Every time she appeared on Fox News, where she signed on as a contributor in 2009, ratings shot up 10-15%, Sherman reported, a phenomenon that repeated itself at MSNBC. Fox even sidelined one of its own reporters after she delivered a tiny morsel of Palin criticism on air. With a $100,000-a-pop speaking fee, TV contracts, and a best-selling memoir, Palin was monetizing the whole time, making upward of $12 million in the year after leaving the Alaska governor’s mansion, out of power but more powerful than ever.
Palin leaned into the media chaos with a smile and not an ounce of restraint, giving her limitless political abilities. When Palin coined the phrase “death panels” during the fight to pass Obamacare, it became the Tea Party’s signature rally cry, repeated endlessly despite being a falsehood. Her appearances at conservative conventions and Tea Party rallies, often while wearing jewelry festooned with American flags, were aired in full on cable news, with reporters assigned to follow her every move. Her ability to raise small-dollar donations from grassroots conservatives was unparalleled. In 2009, when Palin was waffling about speaking at a Washington fundraiser for Senate and House Republicans—a D.C. micro-drama if ever there was one—the back-and-forth was covered exhaustively by NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Politico, and dozens of other outlets. Republican elites were sick of her: The National Journal conducted an “Insiders Poll” of 85 GOP strategists in Washington, and Palin was the top response when asked: “Which voice in your party would you most like to mute?” Of course those insiders only uttered their concerns on background, fearing a GOP base that felt differently.
When Palin started picking favorites in GOP primaries during the 2010 midterms, she instantly became the most coveted endorsement of the election cycle. With her small-staffed political outfit, SarahPAC, Palin didn’t bring much of a political machine to the table, but a single social media post could generate enough media coverage and fundraising dollars to flip the direction of a primary overnight. In May 2010, when Palin endorsed Nikki Haley just before South Carolina’s four-way gubernatorial primary and appeared with her at a rally in Columbia, Haley was left for dead in last place. A few weeks later she was the Republican nominee. Former Haley adviser Rob Godfrey, who was then working for a rival candidate, told me at the time that Palin’s endorsement was “an earned media blowtorch.” The Washington Post launched a “Palin endorsement tracker” to follow along. Some of Palin’s picks were conspiracy lunatics and helpless eccentrics—Republicans like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware—who won their primaries but went on to lose in November, infuriating Republican strategists in Washington who saw their more electable candidates swamped by a single Palin tweet.
It’s memory-holed now, but Palin’s stardom continued unabated all the way through late 2011, a full three years after her arrival on the national scene. Her flirtation with running for the 2012 Republican nomination—never ruling out a bid and allowing supporters to build an operation for her in Iowa—kept her in the headlines. While dancing around a bid of her own, Palin threw carefree darts at declared candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Her newest adviser, a filmmaker named Steve Bannon, helped position Palin as a populist alternative to the “crony capitalism” that had infected Republican politics. Advisers to the Republican candidates all groused privately to reporters about Palin’s headline-grabbing ways, but on the record, they politely welcomed Palin’s possible endorsement and shied away from criticizing her. In the summer of 2011, she announced a “One Nation” bus tour of historical sites up the East Coast, making stops at Fort McHenry, Gettysburg, and Bunker Hill, teasing a presidential run with her telegenic family in tow. Local TV news choppers chased the bus driving up Interstate 76 to air live coverage. ABC News, clearly interested in service journalism, added a helpful interactive map of the Palin bus tour to its website. The only event that managed to push Palin’s bus tour off of cable news was the “hacked” picture of Anthony Weiner’s junk that surfaced on Twitter. But some two months later, Palin was back at it, drawing a horde of press during her visit to the Iowa State Fair.
