The first thing Donald Trump noticed about Sarah Palin was her looks.
“He saw her on television and he thought she was hot… although I won’t use the exact words Trump apparently used to describe her appearance,” New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, the author of Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted, tells New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast.
That’s not all that caught his attention.
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Palin, whose defamation trial involving the Times has been a real doozy (“She didn’t like the question that a New York Times lawyer was posing to her so she blurts out ‘Objection!’” recounts Peters), might have actually inspired Trump’s anti-establishment political persona.
Palin was Trumpy even before there was a word for it, explains Peters. Think about the way she took the “redneck” label colleagues and voters gave her early in her career and threw it back in their faces.
“[He] thought to himself, she’s got so much power, but there’s just something that isn’t working. Like she doesn’t know how to close the deal. And I don’t think he thought to himself, ‘I can replace her,’ but it so happened that there was an opening for somebody like that on Fox news. And what does Trump do? He joins the cast of Fox & Friends as a regular guest.”
Speaking of Trump, Peters tells Molly about the time he interviewed the former president in Mar-a-Lago a few weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, and it’s not an act. He thinks that Donald Trump wholeheartedly believes the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“The anger and the delusion, the denial of reality was just as strong as it was when we saw him on January 6th and the weeks after,” Peters says. “Nothing is ever his fault, any kind of failure is always someone else’s fault. And so, therefore, losing the election was something that was done to him, and he referred to it with this odd passivity. He said at one point, ‘Well, they say I didn’t win.’”
According to Peters, the Republicans he spoke to for the book don’t have any regrets about supporting Trump or election lies. They also don’t care that he’s not the most stellar person.
“A lot of the people who work for him have a very clear eye about who he is and in private will say things,” says Peters. “Steve Bannon said to me once, and I quote this in the book, he said, ‘You know, women hate him because he’s the husband who cheated on you, the dad who forgot your birthday, and the boss who sexually harassed you.”
Plus, Molly asks Peters if he thinks that Trump will run in 2024—and the answer is: It’s complicated.
“He’s a very fickle guy. He changes his mind all the time,” says Peters.
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