Conservative Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis warned that former President Donald Trump is trying to make his most audacious and shameless pitch yet by positioning himself as a champion of democracy.
Despite the fact that Trump has been indicted both by special counsel Jack Smith and by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for his efforts to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 election, Lewis argues that Trump has "a talent for divorcing words from their meanings -- and convincing millions he’s the truth-teller," despite decades' worth of evidence suggesting he lies pathologically.
The goal of this "gaslighting," writes Lewis, is to blunt President Joe Biden's attacks on Trump for trying in 2020 to throw out the votes of 81 million Americans three years ago, all of which culminated in a violent assault on the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
"Remember, Trump is a master at the art of projection. Instead of playing defense, he likes to accuse his opponents of the very thing that he himself is guilty of," writes Lewis. "He has done it before. Take, for example, the term 'fake news.' Most of us first heard the term in reference to Macedonian teens who were making money off phony pro-Trump Facebook posts. But Trump co-opted the term and weaponized it against CNN."
Lewis concludes by arguing that Trump's strategy may be shrewd, whether he fully grasps its implications.
"He may not win, but Trump is playing a very high-level game of three-dimensional chess that, I suspect, he might not even consciously understand," writes Lewis. "Never underestimate his lizard brain."