The swift and varied legal actions taken against former President Donald Trump as he navigates his campaign for 2024 reelection have two main goals, according to author and commentator James Lindsay. The first is to overburden the GOP frontrunner in the public eye, making the situation so “messy” voters lose hope in him as a candidate, and the second is to “provoke the American public into giving up the rule of law,” he says.
“There’s a very deliberate operation going on,” Mr. Lindsay said on an episode of American Thought Leaders: Now with Jan Jekielek on EpochTV. People in the know refer to it as “fifth generational warfare,” he said, and although it may sound convoluted, it is simple once you look at the tactics.
Mr. Lindsay broke down several tactics being used against President Trump, from a psychological tactic narcissistic abusers are known to use, to Marxist strategies outlined by Saul Alinsky in his book “Rules for Radicals.”
The “us versus them” in this case is not a left or right matter, he added, but “normal people who believe in the American experiment, whether left, right center, Democrat, Republican, white, black doesn’t matter. Everybody who believes in America and the Western civilizational project is who is the ‘us’ in this us–them dynamic.”
“The people who want to destroy and break that and are using us to do it are the ‘them,'” he said. “And we can formulate countermeasures once we understand how their tactics work.”
‘DARVO’ Distraction
DARVO, or “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender,” is a psychological tactic that has been coined to describe a pattern of manipulation by abusers.
“Every time that something comes out, they deny that it happened, they attack the person making the accusation, and then they try to reverse the roles of victim and offender so that they’re the poor victim, but somebody else is the offender,” Mr. Lindsay said.
He says we all see this tactic play out in the media cycles: “Every time there’s a scandal that comes out around the Biden family, they turn around and they deny that it happened, attack Trump, and try to make it out that Trump is some kind of actual criminal offender and they of course, are not.”
“This is a classic technique,” Mr. Lindsay said.
By Jan Jekielek and Catherine Yang
