A bookend to the Tea Party era?

Before the Palin endorsement of Trump today, Jim Geraghty wrote his morning newsletter for National Review, speculating on the meaning of such an endorsement:

Support from Palin would give Trump some cover on the inevitable attacks from Cruz that he’s an establishmentarian in populist clothing. That’s Trump’s biggest vulnerability; any cover he can get for it from another populist with a national profile will help him. The larger meaning of Palin endorsing Trump, though, would be the signal it sends that populist conservatism is now less about conservatism than it is about populism. If you have enough of the latter, you don’t need to worry much about the former. It would be a bookend to the tea-party era, which started with Palin and Glenn Beck yelling at Obama about progressive tyranny and would end with Beck yelling at Palin and Trump about progressive tyranny.

If you consider Ted Cruz the conservative ideal or near-ideal in terms of philosophical grounding, legal perspective, and ideological rigor -- and the case for that seems pretty self-evident -- then watching tea-party leaders flock to Trump over him is pretty damn disappointing.

...Trump, the guy who hosted two fundraisers for Charlie Crist in 2009. He donated to Harry Reid over Sharron Angle in 2010.

Trump, the guy who donated $50,000 to make Rahm Emanuel the mayor of Chicago.

In the founding days of the Tea Party, Donald Trump was exactly what they were fighting against . . . and now some of those adherents have embraced him fully.

read more here.