Then Donald Trump himself confirmed that the “conspiracy theory” put forth by groups challenging the legality of the citizenship question was true.

“Number one, you need it for Congress for districting, you need it for appropriations, where are the funds going, how many people are there, are they citizens or not citizens?” Trump told reporters on Friday, explaining why the administration was reversing its original decision to abandon the citizenship question. That statement not only confirms that the majority in the census case was correct, it proves that the dissenters were defending a lie, while accusing their opponents of bad faith. Ironically, this sort of behavior is all too typical of Trump backers like Thomas.

This is a constant risk for Trumpists—that they will commit to vigorous defenses of Trumpian falsehoods, only to be made fools when the president abandons the deception or changes his mind, when it becomes politically convenient. Fortunately for them, the cult of personality surrounding the president is immune to the shame of forcefully defending things its members know not to be true. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that cult of personality now includes members of the Supreme Court, willing to give their implicit blessing to schemes designed to entrench white voting power, in defiance of the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection regardless of race. Republican elites have concluded that restricting the electorate is a more reliable path to power than appealing to minority voters, and are now committed to the course of rigging elections so that they can maintain dominance even when they fail to win a majority of the votes.

For those keeping score at home, The Washington Post has documented at least 10 instances of the Trump administration contradicting its own statements on the citizenship question. When the Trump administration told Congress and the public that the citizenship question on the census was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, that was a lie. When the Trump administration denied that its intent was to use the data to draw congressional districts that would enhance white voting power and therefore grant Republicans an advantage, that was false. When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Congress the data would not be used for immigration enforcement, that was untrue. Francisco told the Court that the census questionnaire had to be finalized by June; the Department of Justice has now reversed that position.

Ideally, the executive branch lying to the public and the other branches of government would hold certain consequences. But Democrats in Congress are too frightened and weak to properly discharge their oversight duties, and at least four justices on the Supreme Court believe that the law should bend to whatever falsehood Trump decides to embrace. Only Chief Justice John Roberts’s pained conclusion—that under administrative law, the Commerce Department could not justify its census decision based on public falsehoods—prevented the Trump administration’s dishonesty from being rewarded.