In the Kafkaesque world of President Donald Trump, unsubstantiated widespread voter fraud accounts for the fact that he lost the 2016 presidential popular vote while substantiated Russian election campaign meddling, which may have facilitated his victory in the electoral count, is nothing but a “hoax.”

Though it’s taken an intensive FBI probe, hearings by two congressional committees, a more than year-long investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and numerous journalistic exposes to shed light on the mendacity of the second of Trump’s claims, it’s taken only one determined man, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a former member of the now defunct Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, to demonstrate the fecklessness of the first.

In an Aug. 3 letter to the commission’s leaders, Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (now a candidate in a tight GOP gubernatorial primary race in which he was endorsed by Trump), Dunlap wrote that he found no evidence of voter fraud in his review of the thousands of pages of commission records released to him under court order. (Not surprisingly, Kobach, a proponent of stricter voter id laws, responded with a statement to the Washington Post which accused Dunlap of being “willfully blind to the voter fraud in front of his nose.”)

Delivering a scathing indictment of the commission’s real mission, Dunlap accused it of “troubling bias,” asserting that White House claims of “substantial evidence of voter fraud” were intended to further a “preordained objective: ratifying the President’s arguments that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 elections.”

Dunlap was appointed to the commission in February 2017. Concerned that the body’s leadership was working in a secretive manner towards a predetermined result, however, he filed suit against it in November of that year. The following month a federal judge ordered the commission to provide Dunlap with documents he sought relating to its work. Shortly afterward, President Trump used such “endless legal battles at taxpayer expense” as a pretext to abruptly disband the commission, which had only met twice.

The documents were finally produced in July, and Dunlap has made them available to the public.

Dunlap’s conclusion about the commission should come as no surprise.

Trump has proven a consummate practitioner of the “big lie,” an art perfected by Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and summed up in the Hitler henchman’s oft-quoted statement, “A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

Comedian Richard Pryor distilled this idea into a punchline, recounting that he asked his wife when she caught him cheating with another woman, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

It’s easy to overlook Trump’s dissembling about voter fraud, when so much of his noisy posturing has related to the Russian connection. In his tweets, speeches and interviews, Trump has relentlessly denied or discounted the evidence amassed, and opinions voiced, by his own law enforcement and national security teams pointing to the conclusion that Vladimir Putin’s regime launched a cyber disinformation campaign to disrupt the 2016 elections.

Depending on the day and venue, Trump either describes evidence of Russian election interference as a “hoax” concocted by the Democrats and “crooked” presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to excuse their unexpected 2016 loss at the polls or grudgingly concedes that Russia, along with other countries, may have attempted to meddle in the election while insisting that their efforts were ineffective in swaying the outcome.

On other occasions, the president has simply side-stepped the issue, asserting that there was no “collusion” between his campaign and Russians. (Although there’s plenty of evidence of communications and meetings between Russian operatives and members of the Trump campaign team, the answer as to whether there was a criminal conspiracy between the two will have to await the findings of the Mueller investigation)

In contrast to roiling revelations about Russia interference, Dunlap’s dogged efforts to expose the chicanery of the short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission have so far proven nothing but a minor embarrassment to an administration that has significantly raised the bar as to what constitutes a White House scandal.

Still we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of Dunlap’s achievement in exposing the fraud in Trump’s voter-fraud claim.

After all, in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the Emperor’s New Clothes, it took only one small child to pierce a pervasive public delusion by pointing out that the emperor “has nothing on.”

 Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 10 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com