A former senior adviser for the John McCain is bashing Sarah Palin for endorsing Donald Trump.

The move also caps off Palin’s estrangement from John McCain. In 2008, McCain’s selection of the little-known Alaska governor – who electrified the presidential race but came off as erratic and uninformed – as his running mate helped seal his defeat. Trump has relentlessly attacked John McCain, and notoriously challenged the Arizona senator’s status as a war hero at a July event in Iowa.

“It’s just classless,” said a former senior adviser to McCain of the endorsement, predicting it would backfire. “It’s undermining to a key Trump message which is one of competency. What Trump has said is that he’s going to hire the very best people and bring in men of Carl Icahn’s ilk … and he’s appearing with someone who’s viewed as one of America’s most astounding morons.”

And if it wasn’t for John McCain’s senior advisers in 2008, that astounding moron would still be the little-known Alaska governor, assuming she didn’t quit that job to be the head cart-wrangler at K-Mart.