First they tried to beat him at the polls. They lost miserably.

Then they unleashed America’s most powerful and penetrating espionage apparatus against him at the height of the presidential campaign. And got caught red-handed.

Once he assumed the White House, they tried beating him with a sprawling federal investigation into “Russia collusion” — only to discover that they themselves were the only ones colluding with the Kremlin to tilt the 2016 election.

Frustrated, exhausted and completely out of ideas, the Grand Cyclops of the Washington Swamp has finally resorted to the only thing that has resulted in a presidential impeachment since Reconstruction: a raunchy sex scandal.

So they dredge up old stories from President Trump’s colorful past as a tabloid titan, real-estate showman and reality-TV star. Old stories — stories that keep evolving and remain unverified — about alleged affairs from long before he ever got into politics.

Over at CNN — the old Communist News Network, turned Clinton News Network, turned Collapsing News Network — former “journalists” have gone full-bore to repaint these old stories as shiny and new, and they are trotting them out for the real, real REAL final kill-shot.

Porn “star” Stormy Daniels was on “60 Minutes” this weekend. For real. Not making this up.

Hovering at the very front of the crowd lurking outside the peep-show curtain is none other than CNN’s Anderson Cooper, a longtime veteran of the racy old Times Square scene.

Earlier this week, it was a Playboy model he interviewed — but only for the stories. Seriously.

Next up: Stormy Daniels, famous for multitasking and handling several men at once on screen. Mr. Cooper will prove hardly a match for this gal.

This important interview comes after Stormy Daniels posed for pictures, apparently submitting to a lie detector test.

It was unclear in the picture whether she really did hook up with an actual polygraph machine or if it was a black snake strangling a package of Easter peeps.

The polygraph is an “instrument for recording several pulsations of the body at the same time.” Behold the polygraph versus the poly-receptacle.

These swamp denizens, so desperate to deliver the kill-shot to Mr. Trump, insist they have dug up his Monica Lewinsky. My goodness, haven’t these people piled enough insult and injury upon Monica Lewinsky?

That woman, Ms. Lewinsky, never posed nude. She is not a porn “star.” She never sought the spotlight, telling conflicting stories about a relationship with the president.

She never offered to pay back $130,000 so that she could “tell her story.” (By the way, how many successful porn hits do you have to make in order to have so much money you are actually willing to PAY $130,000 to “tell your story”? Or, perhaps, is there something else going on here?)

Anyway, Ms. Lewinsky was a 22-year-old White House intern when she was repeatedly and recklessly molested by the most powerful man on the planet — who also happened to be her boss.

Also, then-President Bill Clinton performed his sick, predatory lechery on government time in his government office, using his government position to not only collect sexual favors but to subsequently cover them up and punish those seeking the truth.

And of course, the media scandal surrounding Mr. Clinton’s Lewinsky lechery stemmed from the fact that America’s most powerful media organizations of the day were desperately trying to cover up the story. It wasn’t until internet news impresario Matt Drudge revealed the cover-up (as well as the original scandal) that the top was blown off the story.

In these days of fake news, it is nearly impossible to discern who is lying and who is just being snookered. But one thing is for sure, NOBODY is trying to cover up for Stormy Daniels.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.