For two months, President Trump lied to his own supporters that he had actually won the presidential election. After feeding his following a saccharine diet of conspiracy theories involving midnight ballot theft and collusion with dead dictators, he egged on his supporters to storm the Capitol and terrorize Congress into overturning the democratically decided result of 2020, resulting in the death of four of his supporters and a police officer bludgeoned to death. While he was reportedly “delighted” looking at the first siege of the people’s house in centuries and refusing to authorize the National Guard to stop it, Trump did lament how “low class” the followers running to their deaths in his name looked on television.

Trump built his tawdry carcass of a persona for a quarter century by lying to those he aimed to charm. He lied to the tabloids under the pseudonym John Barron about his sex life as a headline hedonist. He lied to his business partners as he tried to cosplay as a successful entrepreneur. He lied to his NBC minions trying to reinvent him into a celebrity on “The Apprentice.” And for the past half decade, he’s lied to his followers.