Republicans – even as abnormal as the party has become compared to the good old days of say, Bob Dole, John McCain and Sarah Palin – oh, wait, skip the last one – have a problem. The problem they have is a very common one for human beings: how to recognize that you are dead wrong, change your view 180 degrees, and yet never admit you were wrong in the first place. This is the hardest thing for human beings to do. Our most basic instinct is to preserve our good view of ourselves, or save face, as Eastern cultures conceive of it – at all costs whether to truth, justice, reality, or sanity.
Republicans have gone all in on the contractor-stiffing, pussy-grabbing, burger-munching, toilet-tweeting Trump and he has turned out – not all that surprising, really – to be worse than a dud. He has been revealed to be – how do you say this in dispassionate terms? Well, many might say that his ideas and actions are idiotic and even bat-shit crazy! Even the normally sedate Hillary Clinton has called this administration “dumb” and “dangerous.” (1)
Marco Rubio, in a stunning admission of bad faith and haplessness, has just announced that the administration is ready to “walk away” from a “deal” on Ukraine. This comes, obviously, from a president who repeatedly promised to have a peace deal within twenty-four hours of taking office. (2) The economy, with on-again, off-again reckless and pointless tariffs, is turning into a shipwreck. (3) Well-educated and knowledgeable economists are crying: “wait, what?!” On Wall Street and Bay Street, the stock markets have turned out to be fun house carnival rides with the lights off. On Main Street, car dealerships are offering to accept first-borns as down-payments, and retirees are once again considering what flavour of Purina dog food to choose for dinner. Dollar Stores are considering having literal fire sales. Even Kansas farmers are posting, “WTF?” on their Instagram and TikTok accounts .
The psychopathic Musk and his Dodgy team, given licence to destroy, are on a mindless rampage, ripping apart the structures of good government and civic well-being that have taken decades to build. Even old grannies and grandpas like myself are taking to the streets with protest signs that say things like Save Our Democracy, You Dirty S.O.B., or Who the F*** Elected Elon Musk? Republican constituents are tarring and feathering paper effigies of non-attending Republican Representatives at raucous town-hall meetings after first castigating those effigies for the failure of Congress to put a stop the shredding of the American Social Contract.
Trump and his pathetic side-kick Vance have offended and alienated countries that have been loyal allies since the nineteenth century. When Vance visited Greenland, he had to be confined to the base, lest Greenlanders throw him in the ocean alongside an iceberg or two and watch him sink in that snazzy little parka he bought for the occasion. Presently, only about a third of people from Canada, the country formerly the best friend America ever had, consider the U.S. to be an ally,(4) and that one-third doesn’t read the news much and are likely voting for Pierre Poilievre, the wanna-be Trump, the populist candidate for Prime Minister in Monday’s election. His supporters seem to think Pierre is a wellspring of great ideas, such as investing Canada’s pension funds in unregulated cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, China has agreed that Trump’s pressure is just too much, and have admitted that he is too strong and too great a man, and so they are going to do whatever he wants, if they can just figure it out what that is. Ha, ha — NOT! Fooled ya!
And so, it is apparent that Republicans need a way to abandon Trump, to get out of their predicament of supporting the president, who, one might say appears to be, as the English so politely put it, a nutter.
The problem they have is the cognitive dissonance they will have to contend with given that they were all in for a ride on the Trump-train, and now realize that the train is going over a cliff. Cognitive dissonance can be described as a state of holding “two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent.” (5) This occurs when, for example, we know that cigarette smoking will result in your having to walk around with an oxygen tank, if not kill you outright, but we smoke anyway. Fair enough. But the question becomes, how do we preserve our invariably positive view of ourselves as smart and rational, in the face of such obviously irrational and destructive behaviour? We must justify our self-esteem at all costs. It is in our nature.
In his original participant-observation study of cognitive dissonance, the psychologist Leon Festinger studied a cult who believed that the earth was about to be destroyed by a flood on a particular day. They quit their jobs, gave away their money, possessions, and homes, and went to wait on a hilltop for a flying saucer with Jesus in it to show up and rescue them (something like that, I forget the details of the story). Needless to say, the flying saucer did not show, nor did the flood happen. One might expect them to say: “Damn, I was wrong. I am an idiot! I wonder if I can get my money and job back?” But no, most did not do this. In fact, the more committed they were to the prophecy, the more firmly they held on to their belief. They even went out and proselytized, trying to get others to believe in their nonsensical ideas. The rationale that protected their self-esteem at all costs, was that their very faith and commitment had prevented the flood. They were heroes! They had saved humanity itself because of their faith!
This is how our so-called rationality works: when our rosy picture of ourselves is threatened by the dissonance between reality and our beliefs, rationality operates to provide self-justification that keeps our positive view intact. We almost never say: “I made a mistake,” or “I was stupid” or such.
We, of course, believe we are rational beings but the truth is that we are far from it. (6) We are one step up from monkeys. The only difference is that we have developed more frontal lobe rationality, which has the major function of providing a rational explanation after the fact, for actions already taken, carried out on an emotional, monkey-like basis. Our rationality follows our behaviour, saying: “There! Yes, that is why we did that. For sure. Yes, that’s it, alright. We sure are smart. Smarter than average, definitely.”
Almost no one admits that they are wrong or stupid etc. The extremely rare exceptions are remarkable and stand out. One such example occurred while I was sitting on a jury. Details are changed here to protect privacy and so that I can avoid jail time for revealing jury proceedings. But this Sad Sack was being charged with burglary in a big city neighbourhood; he was the hapless grand-nephew of the complainant, who out of compassion, was tying to help the fellow out by employing him in his submarine shop, even though the chap was inept and nearly useless. In any case, this fellow had arrived at the sub-shop in the middle of the night, gone in, and staggered out a few minutes later carrying a cash register. The problem was that the entire episode was recorded on CCTV, including a full view of his face, his taking the key from the special hiding place, coming back out the door lugging the cash register and loading it into the back of his beater of a car, and driving off. Of course, he was subsequently arrested, still in possession of the cash register, which he had not figured out how to open. When asked why he did all this – that is, trying to rob his great-uncle who had taken pity on him, and that he knew that the CCTV was in operation and he did it all in full view and would be easily identified – he did not justify himself. He did not provide a rationale that would leave his dignity and self-esteem intact.
Instead, he said, in his transcribed confession: “I know. I am a moron.” In fact, he said: “I am an [expletive] moron,” where the expletive starts with “f,” has a “k” in the middle, and ends with”g,” which the city officer faithfully recorded.
Now in my books, this guy is totally unique, and almost unheard of in the history of humanity: an honest person who recognized his true self and admitted it. Who does this? His remarkable honesty should be recognized and honoured for what it is: nearly unheard of in the annals of human cognitive dissonance. I would go as far as to propose a monument – at the U.S. National Mall would be best – of similar scale to the Lincoln Memorial – in recognition of this man’s honesty. I propose that it say:
“This memorial is erected to remember and honour Beavis Butthead (not his real
name), a man whose radical honesty is a beacon and inspiration to all who seek
truth in understanding the self and in speaking righteously to humanity.”
And so, Republicans have a problem. They are in a -grand-nephew-robbing-the-sub-shop-caught-on-CCTV moment. Trump said what he was going to do, and now he is doing it, and it as a disaster.
One might hope that a critical number of Republicans might follow the sub-shop robber and say; “My God, I have made a terrible mistake in hitching my ass to the Trump wagon.” Or they might say: “I supported him because I hoped it would result in my collecting more money off the backs of middle-class and poorer people, but now I see that is not working well.” Or, they might say, “I am just an [expletive] moron who hates everybody, and I thought Trump was my kind of guy.” But no, they can’t do this, because such admissions would risk public exposure of their indecency and more important, threaten self-esteem. They have to come up with something more face-saving. But I am here to save the day and say not to worry – although not always easy, it is done successfully all the time! (7) Fortunately I am a highly trained social scientist, with a thorough understanding of cognitive dissonance and the relationship between self-esteem and self-justification, and so I can advise on this matter.
The rationale need not be true – there is no relation between self-justification and truth, and in any case, we live in the post-postmodern era, when such things as truth and reality are irrelevant fictions. In the postmodern era, say 1980 to 2010, truth became “truth,” with the idea that narratives were propagated to be, quite simply, plausible explanations for power relationships. Then, the postmodernist could, in knowing superiority, “deconstruct” the narrative and power arrangements and then smugly impart them to the poor uninformed dupe – you, that is. So, for example, you might think that Hamlet is a work of unmatched genius, but the postmodernist will let you know that Shakespeare is no giant of literature, but rather is merely an imposed representation of white patriarchal European superiority and colonial dominance.
Post-postmodernism (I have originated this term) – our current era – is different. The stories need not have any relationship to anything, let alone an actual power structure. A narrative does not even need to be plausible, or even possible, to be accepted. In fact, in some cases, the stupider the story is, the better, especially in this era of AI. It just needs to be stated, and then repeated on social media, until the algorithms latch on to it, and then it takes on its own reality.
In our era, we can see this in laughable conspiracy theories that have been propagated and parroted even by those in responsible positions, and have been repeated and believed by thousands, although they are completely ludicrous and bizarre, defying even what is possible. The latter seems to have no effect of believers in these theories. The California wildfires were caused by Jewish lasers in outer space in order to create a burned out corridor for high-speed railroads. The successive hurricanes in the American South were deliberately created by Democrats, in order to destroy Red States. The Los Angeles fires, as shown by houses burning before the trees did, were an inside job, deliberately set…oh, for God’s sake, this is too stupid to repeat, even here, in this post. Even I can’t go that far. My fingers refuse to type further. But you get the idea: reasonableness, feasibility – none of this matters in post–postmodern reality.
In the case of Trump, all that is needed then, is an assertion that things have changed. History can be disregarded, because in the post-postmodern world, nobody remembers any history anyway. So Republicans: all you have to do is to assert that you were right then when you supported him, but things have changed. Your rosy self-view will remain intact. It is simply a matter of asserting that something has happened that has changed the calculation.
One suggestion I have is the idea that he got a worm in his brain after he was elected. That has worked well for one of his cabinet members. It could explain a lot. Or, it might be proposed that it turns out that Melania is a deep-cover, mind-controlling android created by Vladimir Putin, with a mission to destroy America, who has brainwashed him and is refusing to hold his hand unless he carries out her orders to perform destructive acts. It could work.
Probably the best and simplest though, which has already been put forth by some of my Democratic friends, is that Trump has developed dementia since being elected, and that is why he is acting so crazy. (Note that in the post-postmodern era, if doesn’t matter if his original ideas and his post-election ideas and actions are identical – nobody cares.) This does have a degree of plausibility (perhaps that is slightly useful, but again this doesn’t matter all that much), but its big advantage is that it is tested and proven workable. The Democrats already pulled this with great success on their own guy, Joe Biden, although it must be noted that they did go on to lose the election against a convicted felon who already had presided over the goofiest presidency ever.
In any case, it is not difficult to get the ball rolling: just hire a couple of washed-up celebrities to do what George Clooney did in sandbagging Biden. Hire supporters like Sylvester Stallone, Wayne Gretsky, or Caitlyn Jenner, for example, and get them to beg Trump to resign due to his diminished capacity. Once they do that, then the rest of the Republicans and Fox “News” can pile on. Then simply invoke the twenty-fifth amendment. It is a win-win all around.
Voila! Problem solved. Cognitive dissonance resolved. Self-esteem preserved. And the crazy guy is gone. (8)
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1. Clinton, Hillary. “Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?” The New York Times, 28 Mar. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com /2025/03/28/opinion/trump-hegseth-signal-chat.htm. Accessed 24 Apr. 2025.
2. Price, Michelle L. “Trump’s explanation for failing to end Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours as promised.” The Independent, 17 Mar. 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ americas/trump-ukraine-war-russia-sarcasm-b2716424.html, Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
3. Mannweiler. Laura. “‘Monstrously Destructive’ and ‘Unwise’: Leading Economists React to Trump’s Tariffs.” U.S. News and World Report, 3 Apr. 2025, https://www.usnews.com/news/ national-news/articles/2025-04-03/monstrously-destructive-and-unwise-economists-react-to-trumps-tariffs. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
4. “Harper’s Index,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2025, p. 9.
5. Aronson, Elliot, and Joshua Aronson. The Social Animal. 12th ed., Worth Publishers, 2018, p. 60.
6. For an interesting discussion of this, see: Smith-Ruiu, Justin. Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason. Princeton University Press, 2019.
7. Travis, Carol, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Revised edition, Mariner Books, 2020.
8. Of course, then you end up with J. D. Vance as president. But that is a problem for another day. One thing at a time.