News that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would endorse Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary was first broken by people posting on an online chat forum, and not by members of the media.
Trump’s team worked diligently behind the scenes to keep Palin’s endorsement a secret from some of the biggest newsrooms in the country, being extra careful to ensure that news of her allegiance didn’t leak out before it was officially announced.
The billionaire businessman teased her appearance all weekend, repeatedly telling supporters and the press that he would host a special guest Tuesday in the battleground state of Iowa for a huge announcement.
But Trump wouldn’t reveal his mystery guest’s name.
Despite all of his hints, media couldn’t figure out who, exactly, was scheduled to appear alongside the casino tycoon on the campaign trail.
Reporters were left to speculate, and pundits could only guess.
It wasn’t until members of an online chat forum had figured it out that the press finally got wind of the truth.
As reporters moved forward this week unsure of the exact identity of Trump’s campaign guest, member of Free Republic, an online forum for activists, excitedly posted that they had solved the mystery.
A thread that appeared late Monday evening on the chat board showed that a jet from Anchorage, Alaska, was en route to Des Moines, Iowa, later in the week. Free Republic users scrambled to line up the tracking information with Trump’s official campaign schedule.
“Palin is arriving to endorse Trump. You heard it here first,” one user, springwater13, declared, linking to a website that tracked the Iowa-bound flight.
That same user posted later, “Canadair Challenger Executive jet currently en route from Anchorage to Des Moines. Landing 7:57 CST. You never know! If true, Cruz people will go nuts.”
Several notes later, Free Republic users discovered that the same plane was scheduled to arrive later in Tulsa, Okla., on the same day that Trump was scheduled to appear. The same thread concluded that the flight was indeed carrying Palin and that she was arriving in Iowa to endorse Trump.
Members of the press soon noticed the online sleuthing, and they too started following along, watching to see if the billionaire casino tycoon had actually secured Palin’s endorsement in the 2016 primary.
He did, as the New York Times reported just moments before Trump’s team made it official. Tuesday came, and Palin appeared by Trump’s side in Iowa to throw her support behind his candidacy.
Though media officially reported the endorsement just moments before Palin’s address Tuesday, it was all but assumed due to the detective work of the Free Republic community.
This wasn’t the first time that Free Republic scooped national media on a major political story involving Palin: People using the online chat forum did the exact same thing in 2008, tracking with the same flight software, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., announced her as his running mate in the presidential election.
