Careful observers will have noticed something peculiar in this chain of events: McCarthy is moving to push Cheney out of her leadership position for saying in May what he’d said repeatedly himself months before. McCarthy knows that Trump is lying about the election. He knows that Cheney is telling the truth. And he’s choosing Trump anyway. A politician with a modicum of moral sensibility might be embarrassed by the embrace of such an obvious falsehood. Kevin McCarthy is not such a politician. Two weeks after declaring on the House floor that Donald Trump “bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to enlist Trump’s help in achieving his career-long objective of becoming speaker of the House. These kinds of compromises have become commonplace over the last five years. They don’t jump out at us the way they used to, the way they ought to. But there’s something rather extraordinary about it all. McCarthy is on the record saying that Trump is lying about the election results and that he blames Trump for instigating the insurrection on January 6. But he believes that the path to the speakership runs through Mar-a-Lago. And if that means hugging the guy lying about the election, the guy who fomented an insurrection, so be it.