THE HONEST NEED NOT APPLY:

The lie is laughable -- that a deep state of all Democrats, every member of the media, every judge that weighed against his election challenges in court (including the ones he appointed), former AG Bill Barr, makers of voting machines and Republicans throughout the country who certified the results in their states for Biden collaborated on the biggest conspiracy ever. Romney described The Big Lie as "a massive conspiracy, more secret and widespread than any in human history, so brilliant in execution that no evidence can be found of it and no observer among the tens of thousands in our intelligence agencies will speak of it." And Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked, in November, why Trump team lawyer Sidney Powell had not presented any evidence of machines switching votes with helpful planning from dead Venezuelans for a plot that -- if proven -- "would amount to the single greatest crime in American history." (Powell never presented the evidence, by the way.)   

Trump couldn't get his lawyers to touch The Big Lie in the impeachment trial; there were limits to how much they wanted to soil their reputations. The final team representing him at the trial, indeed, took the case after several other lawyers told Trump they refused to claim widespread voter fraud that stole an election  

One of Trump's top Big Lie proliferators, the CEO of the MyPillow company, is now the target of a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems for lying about their voting machines. The complaint against Mike Lindell states: "He is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie. But Lindell ... sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows."  

In addition to pillow sales, The Big Lie soothes Trump's ego, and has helped him raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump even used the occasion of Rush Limbaugh's death last week to sell the lie once again. "The election was stolen," he said on OANN. "We were robbed. It was a rigged election." On Newsmax he said: "We did win the election, as far as I'm concerned. It was disgraceful what happened." And on Fox News Channel he said, "You would have had riots going all over the place if that happened to a Democrat." The Trump-friendly anchors at all three networks refused to push back; they just let him lie.   

This will be a central theme later this week when Trump takes center stage at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) where 2020 election truthers will be peddling doubt at no fewer than seven panel discussions. 

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