Did Palin give birth to the Trump campaign?

Donald Trump never would have tolerated surrendering his stage to anyone for any significant period of time prior to Sarah Palin’s 37-minute diatribe last week when she endorsed the Republican frontrunner.

Though he looked a bit uneasy at times, it seemed that Trump realized Palin paved the way for his bombastic and highly successful 2016 campaign. It was almost as if he tacitly acknowledged that she deserved the spotlight, the opportunity to soak up all that voter anger in the crowd once again.

Nicolle Wallace, a top official in the 2008 McCain-Palin campaign has written an Op-Ed column for the New York Times in which she points out that Trump is “riding the wave of (voter) anxiety that Ms. Palin first gave voice to” as McCain’s running mate.

Trump has “usurped and vastly expanded upon” the Palin constituency, Wallace writes, but the Palin sales pitch that resonated with a core bloc of Republicans eight years ago sounds a lot like the siren song that delights Trump followers.

What Trump learned from Palin is this: Facts don’t matter. And the more outrageous a statement, the better.

Exasperated Republican Party leaders now try to convince themselves that Trump’s bloviating is just a shtick to win the nomination. Once enveloped in the atmosphere of a general election campaign, he will settle down and undergo maturation as a candidate. Really? Trump, the carnival barker? The flamboyant casino owner? Don’t bet on it.

Here’s how Wallace, who also served in the George W. Bush White House, connects the dots between Palin and Trump:

“To some in the news media, voter anger seems like a new phenomenon. But they attended the same Palin rallies I did — we all should have seen this coming. The Alaska governor whipped the crowds into a frenzy with her fiery attacks on the media and the establishment politicians that she had gleefully upended in the Alaska statehouse. When her rallygoers shouted crude comments from the stands … there was no confrontation between Ms. Palin and the offender.

Wallace

When the press started to report on the angry rhetoric coming from those Palin crowds, I remember Sen. McCain’s concern. The growing furor in the Republican Party was something that we, as a campaign, failed to address, but to the crowds, Sarah Palin proved the more satisfying politician on the ticket because of it.”

Fast-forward eight years and here is the warning that Wallace issues for Campaign 2016:

“… That (Trump) would refine and recalibrate his proclamations in a general election or as president is a widely held assumption among the Republican establishment. It’s possible that this is the kind of false comfort that people on a sinking ship murmur to one another about how death by drowning really isn’t a bad way to go.”