This week, Bernie Quigley who writes for The Hill wrote a very important piece where he discussed former Governor Sarah Palin as the person solely responsible for the political rise of Donald Trump. Those who are long time listeners and followers of my show know that I have made the same point:
Hear me: “No Palin No Trump”
“How Trump Embraced Palinism and Won the White House”
Currently, Palin is involved in a lawsuit against the New York Times. This is a libel case she and her lawyers filed after the Times decided to publish an article right after the Rep. Scalise shooting where they rehashed a commonly known false claim that Palin and her PAC caused the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011. The Times has since called that article an “honest mistake”, a claim that I don’t buy. Quigley isn’t buying it either. He believes that this latest attack is just another in a long line from the media on their favorite target Palin.
Quigley writes:
“This is mnemonic slander, that is, slander of Palin by vague and unsubstantiated association with political terrorism. In fact, it was The New York Times and other eastern outlets – the phrase “Eastern Establishment” had become perfunctory – that had set their sights (to coin a phrase) on Palin. Why? Because very simply put, Sarah Palin would bring an end to their world, and she has. She brought apocalypse to the eastern establishment.”
Yes, apocalypse is the best word to describe what her emergence onto the national stage years ago was like for them. Many of them didn’t know who she was. Some of them couldn’t pronounce her last name correctly. They didn’t understand the place she was from. They couldn’t stand what she stood for and they absolutely loathed the people who she connected with the most.
This is why many of them supported and voted for Obama. For them, Obama was just like them—mostly over educated, spent most of his life in academia and government and who never worked a real job in his life. These are the same people who supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump for the same reason. Even though Trump is wildly successful—he’s is not one of them.
The “eastern establishment” that Quigley refers to is yet another label for what most people know as the “political class”, “UniParty” or, what conservative writer Angelo Codevilla dubbed as the “ruling class” back in 2010.
Sarah Palin has been engaged in a war with the ruling class since she was thrust onto the national stage when she was picked to run for Vice President back in 2008. For Palin, it has very much been a guerilla war.
Instead of prematurely mounting a campaign running herself and her family headlong into a meat grinder, she jagged and weaved. First, Palin helped fundamentally change the Congress in 2010. Next, she helped get fresh faces such as Ted Cruz, Ben Sasse and Joni Ernst into the Senate in 2014. Finally, a Palin backed outsider like Donald Trump winning the White House in 2016 was just another battleground won in her movement force strategy against the established order.
As a longtime observer of Palin, I doubt that this is the last move on her chessboard.
But back to the original observation made from Quigley’s article about Palin being directly responsible for the political rise of Trump. He writes:
“What brought my fascination with Sarah Palin when she first appeared on the political scene was a reading 20 years ago of a now famous book — Steve Bannon’s favorite book — “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. With the sudden appearance of Palin it was possible to see the rise of new political archetypes and forms and they are now upon us.
It was not President Donald Trump that brought the age, although he turned the key. It was Palin. And it was she who brought the reawakened spirit of Andrew Jackson, today associated with the rise of Trump.”
Little by little, this idea that Palin was the primer to Trump’s political rise, is starting to become more mainstream. Even mainstream media outlets like PBS have taken notice. A recent Frontline documentary called “Divided States of America” declared that Sarah Palin in 2008 eventually led to Donald Trump’s rise to the White House in 2016. See here: https://youtu.be/O8ZV2iuSa94?t=6m10s
Narrator: “Palin became the voice of a growing number of republicans who were fed up with politics as usual in their party….Palin was the beginning of a challenge to the establishment that would only grow over time.”
Palin was the beginning. Palin brought the age. Trump turned the key.
Now, I am not trying to take anything away from President Trump and make it sound like he had nothing to do with his political rise and this was all because of Palin. Trump had and still has an ability to connect with voters and was savvy enough to embrace issues that conservatives, independents and Reagan Democrats were most concerned about even though those issues may not have been much of a concern to him a few years prior to running for president.
But to those who do not buy the theory that people like myself and Quigley subscribe to, I ask, what was Trump doing four to six years ago? Where were his crowds back in 2011 when he first flirted with running for president that year? What were the political issues that he discussed?
During the birth of the Tea Party movement in 2010, Trump gave mostly to Democrats and establishment favored Republican candidates. As far as issues go, the only issues that Trump talked up consistently then and now are the issues of trade and China. To his credit, he is working diligently to make good on those campaign promises of trade and relations with the superpower China.
But a couple of years ago, Trump really didn’t talk about immigration, the very issue he embraced in the 2016 campaign cycle. He really didn’t discuss law and order. In fact, the main issue that he seemed to be building a campaign on when he first flirted a run for president in 2011 was Obama’s birth certificate.
What about his crowds? When Trump fever began to take off of the Summer of 2016, he was drawing massive crowds. Anytime I saw those crowds on TV or pictures of them on the internet I thought, most of these people are Palin’s people.
If you don’t believe me, just look at Palin’s crowd sizes as opposed to Trump’s crowds just a few years ago. I’m not talking about the huge crowds she drew in 2008. You have to look no further than the CPAC conference back in 2013. As you can see in the first picture, Trump spoke in front of a tiny crowd that year.
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| Trump’s crowd for his speech CPAC 2013 |
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| Crowd overflow for Sarah Palin CPAC 2013 |
In the same ball room the following day, Palin packed the place. I was told by someone who attended her speech, the place was so packed they had overflow going out into another ball room.
We want the Swamp, or what Palin called back then, the Jacuzzi, drained.
During the Obama years, Bernie Quigley wrote several articles on Palin and about what she represented to the American middle. He, like most of Palin’s ardent fans, always had her in mind for filling the role that Trump did in 2016.
However, Sarah Palin has yet to put herself back into the fray at this time. But here is hope for the future of continuing the Trump legacy. As I said in a previous post, I believe that Trump will easily win re-election in 2020. That leaves 2024 and I do not think that Vice President Pence could be trusted to continue what Trump has started.
Yes, 2024 seems like a long, long time ago and a galaxy far, far away but it will be here before you know it. I predict that the same ruling class who shunned and loathe both Palin and Trump, will be foaming at the mouth to take control of the system once Trump gets ready to leave office. That must not happen.
As I’ve stated before, Sarah Palin could again run for Governor in Alaska in a year and easily win her old job back. Or she could continue to work outside the system, build her personal wealth and mount a run for president during the last half of Trump’s second term.
I or other Palin aficionados like Bernie Quigley don’t really know what she will do. But what we do know is Sarah Palin is a woman who believes in destiny. She once wrote in her first book of how, even as a young girl, she believed that everyone has a destiny here on Earth.
Most of her longtime supporters believe that Sarah Palin’s destiny is to become the first female President of the United States of America.
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