Donald Trump’s new Big Lie is here — and it’s already taking over our airwaves

Trump and the Republican Party won the 2024 election — taking the presidency, the House, and the Senate — not by convincing more people to vote for them, but by preventing millions from voting at all. According to official government numbers, at least 4.2 million Americans were denied their right to vote in that election. This effort grew out of Trump’s original “Big Lie” after 2020, when he falsely claimed that “millions” of undocumented immigrants had voted and that there had been massive voter fraud.

That same lie is being carried forward. Some experts now warn that as many as 10 million Americans could be denied their vote in 2028. It’s part of a long pattern — the GOP used similar voter suppression tactics back in the 1960s with “Operation Eagle Eye,” which targeted Hispanic and Native American voters.

But rigging elections was only step one. Now that they’ve taken power, Trump and his allies are moving on to something even more dangerous: attacking the very foundations of American democracy with new “Big Lies.”

The latest Big Lie for 2025 is the claim that America is overwhelmed by “radical left violence.” They say law and order is collapsing, that cities are under siege, and that politicians and critics live in fear. This narrative is being used to justify censorship, banning comedians and commentators, prosecuting critics (including Republicans like James Comey, Chris Krebs, and Miles Taylor), violently attacking protesters, and consolidating media under right-wing billionaires.

A tragic example highlights how twisted this has become. Recently, a man in Michigan — a white, self-described Christian, a Trump supporter, wearing Trump gear — murdered worshipers at a Latter-Day Saints church. Trump’s first response was to call it “anti-Christian violence.” In truth, the killer, a Marine veteran with PTSD, seems to have thought he was defending Christianity, echoing the rhetoric of Trump-aligned preachers like Robert Jeffress, who has called Mormonism a “false religion.”

Instead of asking how this man may have been radicalized by extremist sermons or social media algorithms, right-wing outlets spun the tragedy into proof of supposed “attacks on Christianity,” blaming “the left” for the violence.

This mirrors how the GOP has tried to paint nearly all political violence — from assassination attempts on Trump to attacks against government facilities — as coming from the “radical left.”

But that simply isn’t true.

There is no significant “radical left” in America today. In the 1960s, some extremist groups tied to the Students for a Democratic Society flirted with violence, but they collapsed long ago. Today, left-leaning activists focus on issues like protecting Social Security, creating national healthcare, taxing the ultra-rich, and reducing gun violence. They are not storming churches or shooting at politicians. The last notable attack tied to a leftist was in 2017, when a mentally ill man shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise.

The federal government itself has admitted that almost all political violence in recent decades has come from the right. An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which studied 893 terrorist plots between 1994 and 2020, concluded that right-wing extremists were responsible for most of them. But after Trump allies like Kristi Noem took control, those reports vanished from government websites.

Instead, Trump and the GOP use the false claim of “leftist violence” to justify authoritarian measures — flooding Democratic-run cities with soldiers, pouring public money into militarized policing, and stripping away rights in the name of “security.”

This strategy isn’t new. Back in 1944, during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt warned Americans about the Republican Party’s growing use of “the Big Lie” — a propaganda tactic copied directly from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The method is simple: don’t tell small lies, tell enormous ones. Because the lie is so big, people assume it must be true, especially if it’s repeated endlessly.

Roosevelt gave examples in a speech to the Teamsters: Republicans tried to blame the Great Depression on Democrats, insisted Roosevelt wanted to secretly drag America into war, claimed he would stop soldiers from returning home, and even spread false stories about his dog, Fala. FDR told Americans to recognize these lies for what they were — propaganda meant to deceive and divide.

Today, the pattern is the same. Trump and Republicans have already tried to convince Americans of things that aren’t true:

• That immigrants cause most crime (when immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than native-born Americans).
• That Democrats are pedophiles or protect sexual predators (while Trump himself was close to Jeffrey Epstein and was found liable for sexual abuse).
• That Democrats want to defund the police (when they have supported more funding for local law enforcement).
• That Democrats support “abortion after birth” — an absurd and impossible claim.
• That President Biden planned to ban gas stoves, gasoline cars, and even meat.
• That Democrats are pushing giant middle-class tax hikes.
• That “Antifa” is a domestic terrorist group.
• That liberals want to fund gender-transition surgeries for minors nationwide.
• And just this week, Trump claimed Democrats want to “reopen the border wall.”

All of these are Big Lies — just like the lie about the 2020 election being “stolen,” which fueled the January 6th attack on the Capitol, leaving three officers dead and over 140 injured. And just like the lie about immigrants voting illegally, which helped Republicans strip millions of Americans of their voting rights in 2024.

From FDR’s era, to McCarthy’s Red Scare witch hunts, to George W. Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction that led to two disastrous wars, Republican Big Lies have caused enormous harm to this country.

And today, with Trump back in power, it continues.

Enough is enough.