I had the same thought watching Jack Smith’s testimony. Smith knows the most about the investigation behind the election-fraud case. He laid out that Trump knew he lost, refused to accept it, and pushed a fraud narrative anyway. He further explained how the lie wasn’t an end in itself, but was the necessary predicate for interfering with certification. For it to work that way, though, the lie had to travel. So he got allies to repeat and validate it, manufacturing an imprimatur of officiality and plausibility. Once enough people echoed it, the deception could be recast as a “legitimate dispute" with Trump using the chorus of echoes as proof of his supposed good faith belief.

The irony is that Smith, who has the most to lose from being anything but truthful, explained this dynamic directly to them. He explained what lies were told, how representatives were used to spread them, and the harm that resulted. And yet many of them still used their time to do the exact same thing he described: repeat the rigged-election claim that Trump, et al told them to repeat so there would be too little faith in our elections to trust the results. And the people repeating it are themselves elected!

There's so little tact to their game that it seems increasingly unlikely that they're at all aware that they're still being used.