Louis Nelson in Politico notes President Obama’s comments in a recent interview with New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, in which Obama says that he sees “a straight line” starting from the vice presidential nomination of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to the rise of the tea party movement to the candidacy of Donald Trump.

From Politico:

The path that brought the Republican Party to nominating Donald Trump as its candidate for the White House began in 2008, President Barack Obama said in an interview published Monday, when Sarah Palin joined John McCain’s GOP ticket.

“I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emergence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea party, and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party,” the president told New York Magazine. “Whether that changes, I think, will depend in part on the outcome of this election, but it’s also going to depend on the degree of self-reflection inside the Republican Party. There have been at least a couple of other times that I’ve said confidently that the fever is going to have to break, but it just seems to get worse.”

[…]

That anti-Obama energy made it difficult for Republicans to compromise even when they might have been inclined to do so, the president said. The GOP had shifted as he took office and “the moods that I think Sarah Palin had captured during the election increasingly were representative of the Republican activist base, its core.”

Read the rest here.