President Donald Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him has been repeatedly debunked on both the left and the right, yet he continues to promote what is widely known as the Big Lie. Prominent MAGA influencers, from Dinesh D'Souza to MyPillow's Mike Lindell, have joined him in making that claim. But according to Salon's Sophia Tesfaye, MAGA Republicans are now paying a heavy legal price for pushing Trump's favorite conspiracy theory.

"The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters," Tesfaye explains. "Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project's most enduring images. Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda."

The film at issue is D'Souza's "2000 Mules," which even ultra-conservative firebrand Ann Coulter attacked as "stupid" nonsense.

According to Tesfaye, "The suit should have stripped '2000 Mules' of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago." The film's central allegations rested on cellphone location data supplied by the group True the Vote, and Georgia election officials said their reviews found no evidence of the paid ballot-collection scheme it described.

In "2000 Mules," D'Souza accused Mark Andrews, an auditor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, of election fraud. Georgia election officials who reviewed the surveillance footage the film relied on said Andrews was legally delivering ballots for himself and family members — conduct state law permits — and Andrews, Tesfaye reports, filed a lawsuit after the false accusation was easily disproven.

D'Souza's settlement fits a wider pattern of legal accountability for stolen-election claims. A federal jury in 2023 ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $148 million for defaming them; Fox News agreed that year to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle defamation litigation over its 2020 coverage; and Lindell, whom Dominion and Smartmatic have sued for defamation, was ordered in 2023 to pay a $5 million arbitration award to a software expert who debunked his election-data claims.

"While D'Souza's unraveling took years," Tesfaye reports, "the next chapter of MAGA's fraud theater is falling apart in real time." Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O'Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing — with O'Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa — and walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state's primary. Their objective was to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which allows a registered voter to attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct.

"O'Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge," Tesfaye reports.

A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza. None of the three actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. "Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy," Tesfaye writes.

Tesfaye notes that "falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law" and is "punishable by up to five years" in prison — and that "misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony."

Democratic Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon criticized the stunt, noting that fewer than 0.6 percent of the state's 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71 percent of those were already registered voters simply updating an address. According to Tesfaye, local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than 7 million times; any charging decision would rest with county prosecutors.

The claims have shown staying power in public opinion: polling since 2020 has consistently found a wide partisan gap in Americans' confidence in the nation's elections. "O'Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt," Tesfaye observes. "He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now, it looks like O'Keefe is left holding the bag. That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA's election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too…. The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump's inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it."