For as long as Donald Trump has been leading in polls of Republican presidential primary voters, there has been a rising wave of discontent among a large subset of conservatives. With the Sarah Palin endorsement, the dam finally burst and Trump is unlikely be able to persuade Mexico to pay for its repair.

These are not just casual, rank-and-file conservative voters either. Some of those dismayed at Trump’s success have dedicated their lives to spreading conservatism as they understand it. One representative piece by attorney and conservative writer Sarah Rumpf was titled “Sarah Palin just threw away years of goodwill as a principled conservative.”

Today, Palin is standing in Ames, Iowa, to put her support behind someone who cannot be trusted to protect the unborn, who has twice traded in his wives for younger models (literally), who claims to be for the “little guy” but who has been all-too-willing to use government as a hired thug to line his own pocket, and who spent years making significant donations to Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. [IJ Review]

“Maybe the Tea Party isn’t splintered and weak,” wrote National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “Maybe it’s dead.” His colleague Charles C.W. Cooke wondered if the Tea Party had instead descended from movement to racket. “Today was the day that Rick Santelli’s famous yelp finally melted into populism and avarice,” he argued. “Today, at about 10 minutes past six, P. T. Barnum beat out Hayek for the soul of the insurgent right. Today, the rebels became the charlatans they had set out to depose.”