Apparently, arguing over crowd size at the inauguration wasn't as “alternative” in the fact arena as President Donald Trump can get. The president's recent assertion that as many as 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast, many of them by undocumented immigrants, set a new bar — only to see that lofty standard raised higher with his further conclusion (offered to ABC News' David Muir) that none of those illegal votes were cast for him.

That puts Mr. Trump in some pretty rare air for sheer mind-blowing ludicrousness. Does he have any corroboration of this widespread voter fraud? No. Do the leaders of his own political party back him up on this assertion? Nope. Do those who supervise voting on the state level share his beliefs? Not even the Republican ones. In fact, the only evidence that's been trotted out, a 5-year-old Pew Center on the States study, found problems with voter registration but zero evidence of fraud.

So if the typical problem with registration — a voter appearing on rolls in two states, which is most often because that person moved — is evidence of fraud, then Mr. Trump had better expect to lock up some of his closest allies, including strategist Stephen Bannon, treasury nominee Steve Mnuchin and his daughter Tiffany. Shame about that.

But wait, there's more. This business about illegal voting causing Mr. Trump to lose the popular vote in the election — an assertion so laughable that even his spokesman, Sean Spicer, was reduced to telling reporters “he believes what he believes” to explain it — is apparently enough to justify a “major investigation” into voter fraud. Such a prospect is not only unjustified and chiefly a product of presidential vainglory but a potential launching point for the kind of shameful voter suppression laws that Republicans so relish to keep minorities, the elderly and the disadvantaged away from the polls.

What happened to all those fiscal watchdogs within the GOP who should be outraged by this kind of wasteful expense, this unsupported imperial decree, this abuse of investigative authority? Well, either the crickets are making a racket or it's been pretty quiet on that front. Perhaps they are checking their own voter registration cards for duplicates.

BONUS: Actual fact of the week

At Badlands National Park, the geography isn't the only evidence of badness. How about those employees who fired off facts about climate change on the park's official Twitter account? Oh, sure, they were eventually deleted by, one presumes, the higher-ups within the U.S. Department of the Interior, but it was enough to inspire. As of Thursday, employees from at least a dozen federal agencies from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to NASA have taken to Twitter and other social media platforms to offer unvarnished truth to the general public. The trend may prove one of the better antidotes to fake news in the Trump era — and a reminder that while politicians can make up stuff and get away with it much of the time, they really shouldn't mess with career civil servants.