When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, a lot of us who gathered in Grant Park thought a new day had dawned. It turned out the old day had plenty of life left in it. Millions of people who thought Obama’s election was a terrible thing to happen to America continue to think this eight years later, and they’ve constructed elaborate, fictitious justifications for this belief: Obama was born in Indonesia, and he’s a Muslim socialist, he has a two-part plan to disarm America and conquer it from within.
Or, tap-dancing Republicans can try to send out two messages at once. For instance, Marco Rubio accused Trump of being too “erratic” to be trusted with the nation’s nuclear codes, yet he supports Trump’s candidacy. He accused Trump of racism, but he supports Trump’s candidacy. To name one pundit among the many reacting identically, Steve Benen of MSNBC accused Marco Rubio of “cognitive dissonance”—as if Rubio needed to be told he was contradicting himself. Come on! Was mere cognitive dissonance at play when Mark Antony delivered Caesar’s funeral oration? “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” said Antony, who praised Caesar until the Forum rang with cheers and Brutus was a dead man walking. Republicans, with an opposite mission, hail Trump while they bury him.
