Lying for Trump is no big deal, right?

Frank Lopez Jr. and Victor Avila are accomplished people.

That much was evident when both of these Republican primary challengers in U.S. Congressional District 23 visited with the Express-News Editorial Board on the morning of Feb. 9 for a candidate endorsement meeting.

Lopez served in the U.S. Border Patrol for 30 years after completing a three-year stint in the U.S. Army.

Avila worked as a supervisory special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and as an accredited diplomat to Mexico, Spain and Portugal.

Lopez and Avila are challenging GOP incumbent U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, and both of them spent much of the meeting depicting Gonzales as a fake conservative, soft on border enforcement and insufficiently loyal to former President Donald

Trump.

During the meeting, both candidates were asked for their thoughts on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which Trump die-hards tried to intimidate then-Vice President Mike Pence and Republican members of Congress into blocking the certification of an election that Trump falsely insisted had been stolen from him.

Many Republicans don’t like talking about Jan. 6. They’ll often say it’s time for everybody to move on. Let go of the past. After all, it wasn’t that big a deal, right?

If you ignore the fact that this was the only time in 236 years of American presidential elections in which the loser refused to accept the results and tried to prevent the winner from taking office, sure, it was no big deal.

If you ignore the fact that Trump prodded Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him the 11,780 votes he needed to flip the state, it was no big deal.

If you ignore the fact that Trump pressured county election officials in Michigan to block vote certifications, schemed to create slates of pro-Trump fake electors in battleground states that he lost and demanded that top Justice Department officials parrot his phony line that the election was fraudulent, it was no big deal.

If you ignore the fact that Trump summoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists to Washington, D.C., where they attacked Capitol police, smashed windows, smeared feces in Capitol hallways, took over congressional offices (including the one belonging to the speaker of the House) and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence” while erecting a wooden gallows for him, it was no big deal.

At the Editorial Board meeting, Lopez blasted Gonzales for voting to certify the 2020 presidential election. Lopez also downplayed the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Lopez said the only troublemakers at the Capitol were liberal “plants.” When pressed for evidence to support that allegation, he provided none.

Lopez also suggested that all the focus on Trump’s bid to overturn the election was overblown, because Hillary Clinton had similarly refused to accept the election results when she lost to Trump in 2016.

This is where I found myself getting irritated.

The 2016 election happened a little more than seven years ago. This isn’t ancient history, folks.

Even if we don’t remember what happened, it’s easy enough to find the video of Clinton delivering a 12-minute, nationally televised concession speech the morning after the election, congratulating Trump. The night before she delivered that speech, Clinton called Trump to extend a personal congratulations, a phone call that Trump acknowledged in his victory speech.

Two and a half months later, Clinton attended Trump’s inauguration.

But Lopez apparently had unquestioningly accepted some easily debunked garbage that Trump apologists have spouted in an effort to normalize the extremely abnormal tenor of Trump’s 2020 election response.

Lopez spent three decades of his life in law enforcement. He also served as the Val Verde Republican Party chair. He now wants voters to send him to the U.S. House of Representatives. But he didn’t hesitate to throw out a wild, unfounded allegation simply because the lie was so convenient.

The tributaries of political rhetoric are flooded these days with these kinds of falsehoods. They’re poisoning our system. They’re trying to convince us to disbelieve what we’ve seen with our own eyes and forget what we’ve heard with our own ears.

Above all else, they’re straining to find false equivalence, to persuade us that the unhinged, destructive rantings of a sore loser are well within the bounds of the American political tradition.

In other words, no big deal.