Moments ago, Donald Trump acknowledged that Barack Obama was born in the United States. You all know that’s a big deal because Trump was the leader of the so-called “birther” movement, which critics called racist.

But watch the festival of cognitive dissonance that happens today among Trump’s critics and the media. They need to explain why the birther thing was racist. What exactly is the reasoning for that connection?

Jake Tapper says the connection between the birther movement and racism is so obvious that you would have to be “naive” to think it wasn’t about race, given that Obama is black. And also given that the “birther” idea had no credible evidence.

But how does that explain why Trump said Ted Cruz was Canadian? Is it because Trump is also racist against Canadians?

That’s the problem the media will have to wrestle with today. And Trump has turned all of them into idiots because there is no real answer to the Ted Cruz analogy. A rational person would look at this situation and say that Trump uses every available option to win, and birtherism helped him get this far because it gave him a launch pad.

Birtherism also allowed Trump to do what hypnotists call pacing and leading. First, he matched the Obama-hating Republicans by being one of them. That’s called pacing. Once they accepted him as one of them, he was in the position to lead. He just did that by saying Obama was born in this country.

The answer to why Trump pursued the birther issue is that he thought it would work for him, persuasion-wise. And it did. Unambiguously. Just the way a Master Persuader would expect.

First he paces, then he leads. Watch for that pattern in everything he does.

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