Sarah Palin's court loss against The New York Times is the final nail in the coffin of a public career that has been sliding inexorably toward oblivion, Alex Sammon wrote in a blistering analysis for Slate published on Tuesday evening.
Palin's defamation suit against The Times, the third such suit of the decade after previous verdicts were thrown out by an appeals court for procedural issues, ended with the jury finding, after just three hours of deliberation, that the paper could not be held legally liable for wrongly implying, in a 2017 article, that Palin may have incited the 2011 Tucson mass shooting that severely injured former Rep. Gabby Giffords.
But it caps off a long string of humiliations — and a "steady public decline" — for the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate once seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, wrote Sammon.
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"A guilty verdict in the long-shot defamation case may have resolidified Palin’s reputation in Republican politics," Sammon wrote. "Conservatives have long sought an opportunity to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that strongly limited the ability of a public official to sue for defamation. But in the three years since the first go-around of the Palin trial, conservatives have moved on. More recently, billionaire Trump donor and casino magnate Steve Wynn filed a libel lawsuit against the Associated Press, which seemed more promising than Palin’s effort. But that, too, failed: The Supreme Court declined to hear it in March."
Notably, he wrote, this comes after Palin suffered a resounding humiliation while trying to get back into elected office: "Her 2022 run for Alaska’s at-large congressional seat was also a multi-try failure; despite an endorsement from President Donald Trump, she lost in a special election and again in a general election in 2022 to Democrat Mary Peltola. With her finally on the sidelines in 2024, Republicans won the seat back."
The defamation suit, Sammon continued, was one of her final shots at breaking through the cycle for Republicans — and that, too, failed.
And in a final humiliation, he concluded, "Palin has said publicly that she 'would love to' take a position in the Trump administration. But as of February, according to News Nation, she 'hasn’t been contacted.'"
