To support his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had really won the election. U.S. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz subsequently contested the election results in the Senate. Their effort was characterized as "the big lie" by President-elect Joe Biden. "I think the American public has a real good, clear look at who they are", Biden said two days after the Capitol was attacked. "They're part of the big lie, the big lie." Republican senators Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey, scholars of fascism Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Russian affairs expert Fiona Hill, and others have also used the term big lie to refer to Donald Trump's false claims about massive election fraud.