Donald Trump regularly lies to America, about all kinds of things. Nothing new there.

But one particular variation on the former president's central Big Lie of mass voter fraud — that it includes an influx of noncitizens voting illegally — is especially toxic, for two reasons: One, it leverages and normalizes xenophobia and racism; and, two, it's now being widely adopted by congressional Republicans.

House Speaker Mike Johnson last week pressed that lie at an appearance at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, touting Republican legislation to require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote.

This is not at all the "common sense" reform that Johnson claims it to be. That assertion might sound reasonable to anyone without the basic facts at hand, but it actually represents a daunting new barrier to a fundamental American right, in a putative effort to solve a non-existent problem.

We've asked it before, but it's worth asking again: Just how stupid and hateful does the GOP think (and hope) that Americans are?

To start with the facts: There is no evidence or indication — zero, nada, none — that noncitizens have voted in federal elections on anything more than a statistically microscopic level.

Study after study, from myriad sources, has found that noncitizen voting almost never happens. The left-leaning Brennan Center examined 23 million votes from the 2016 election and found just 30 (Not 30% — 30 ballots) that indicated a potential noncitizen had voted. The right-leaning Heritage Foundation, which argues that noncitizen voting is a problem, nonetheless found fewer than 100 examples of it among roughly a billion ballots cast over multiple decades.

In short, every serious analysis ranks illegal noncitizen voting as being roughly akin to lightning deaths in terms of rarity.

Further, in the vanishingly small number of cases when it has happened, it's almost always an innocent mistake, such as a legal-resident immigrant wrongly believing he or she had the legal right to vote.

The cartoonish fantasy that Trump and his enablers promote — of brown-skinned "illegals" creeping over the southern border and into voting booths to steer U.S. elections left-ward — not only comes with no evidence, it defies the most basic common sense.

To believe it, you must believe that a person who is here illegally, with every motive to avoid drawing attention, might logically be willing to risk capture and deportation (or prison) by knowingly committing an easily exposed federal crime in order to add (1) vote to the tally of a political candidate.

If this is the sophistication level of supposed Democratic Party electoral conspiracies, Republicans truly have nothing to fear.

Still, Trump has been proselytizing the debunked myth of noncitizen voting since shortly after the 2016 election. Though he won the Electoral College majority and thus the presidency that year, his ego couldn't abide the fact that he'd lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by close to 3 million ballots.

So he appointed a White House commission stacked with sycophants to find evidence of the millions of illegal votes supposedly cast by noncitizens. Unsurprisingly, this presidential snipe hunt turned up exactly nothing and the commission was quietly disbanded in early 2018.

Trump has continued blowing that dog whistle anyway. Democrats "are allowing these people to come in — people that don't speak our language — they are signing them up to vote," he alleged, out of typically baseless thin air, during the Iowa caucuses in January.

Trump's almost comical ignorance regarding the realities of the voting process has been well established. He once alleged that people were voting multiple times by changing hats. But the fact that ostensibly rational players elsewhere in the GOP have fully embraced this poisonous project is freshly alarming.

The argument that presenting proof of citizenship to vote is a minor inconvenience that's necessary to confront a major electoral threat is exactly backward.

People already must show an ID and swear to their citizenship when registering to vote. Adding a requirement to produce a birth certificate or passport would be one more unnecessary impediment — one that marginalized voters especially could find onerous — in order to confront an utterly imaginary threat.

"There's so many millions of illegals in the country that if only one out of a hundred voted," Speaker Johnson said at Mar-a-Lago Friday, "they would cast potentially hundreds of thousands of votes in the election."

Consider the astonishingly misleading construct of that sentence: If only one out of a hundred people committed this crime? A crime that in fact happens once (at most) in multiple millions of ballots?

Johnson's motives are easily understood. Extremists in his caucus are on the verge of removing him from his speakership for failing to fully back their agenda, particularly regarding immigration reform. Never mind that they have already refused a historic reform package on orders from Trump, because he wants an election-year border crisis rather than a solution.

Thus, Johnson's pilgrimage to Florida, to kiss the Trumpian ring and echo this most putrid of Trumpian lies. In doing so, he and his party insult the intelligence of any voter, of anyparty, who is at all familiar with the facts.

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