Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of January 6, is now available for purchase.

There are a thousand ways to attack a sitting president as vulnerable as Joe Biden and a thousand different ways to go about it.

If I were Trump’s coach for the upcoming Thursday debate, I would advise the former president that the most memorable way for him to proceed would be to attack not Biden’s obvious weaknesses——immigration, inflation, energy, the economy, Afghanistan—but his perceived strength, namely his imagined role as a defender of democracy.

Trump’s goal here is to awaken the politically indifferent, those millions who have taken Biden at his word. A good place to start is by reminding viewers of what Biden said at their last debate in October 2020, ideally word for word:

“Look, there are fifty former National Intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said that this has all the characteristics—four—five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”

Biden here was about talking about his son Hunter’s laptop, the one that revealed the family’s shady deals with bad actors across the globe. Rather than speaking in general terms, Trump might do what Dan Bongino has recommended: produce a replica of the actual $40,000 check “the big guy” received as his 10 percent share in a shady money laundering scheme that originated in communist China.

Fortunately for Trump, the FBI authenticated the laptop during Hunter’s gun trial. Biden, of course, knew all along the laptop was Hunter’s. He knew the New York Post’s story about the laptop was anything but “garbage.” Trump needs to drive this point home.

Trump should also remind viewers why Biden lied: the truth would have cost him the election. Analysts estimate that between 4 and 15 percent of his voters would have voted otherwise had they known the laptop story was true.

A lie this big required a big cover up. To stay viable, Trump tells the viewers, Biden apparatchiks strong armed the social media companies into de-amplifying the laptop story or blocking it altogether. This censorship wasn’t about saving democracy. It was about saving Biden’s candidacy.

Big Media played along. Biden knew they would. They had spent much of the prior four years peddling the most outrageous dirty trick in political history—Hillary’s Russia collusion hoax. The media used to expose corrupt deep state actors, Trump reminds the audience while staring at his CNN hosts. Now they give them exposure to smear their enemies.

Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken set the laptop coverup in motion. Not many people know this. It is Trump’s job to tell them how Blinken and cronies recruited 51 “intelligence folks”—here Trump uses air quotes—to sign on to this lie.

There is a word for using the CIA and FBI to unseat a sitting president, Trump informs the audience. It’s called a coup.

At this point, Trump pivots to January 6. He has to make this issue his own. Half of America, he tells the viewers, saw the coup for what it was. A million or so of them showed up on January 6, 2021, to protest the election that Biden and his 51 co-conspirators clearly rigged.

Four people died that day, all of them Trump supporters, three by police action. This will come as news to the viewers, Republicans included. Here Trump can get graphic. One woman was beaten over the head while she lay dying. Another women was shot and killed without warning. A third woman, who survived, suffered the worst police beating captured on video since Rodney King.

At this point, Trump challenges Biden and the CNN hosts to checks his facts. They won’t know where to begin. Now, he moves in for the kill.

To compensate, he says emphatically, Biden’s people had to create martyrs of their own. So when officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes on January 7, Biden’s accomplices told the media that protestors killed Sicknick with a fire extinguisher on January 6.

To sell the lie the Biden people committed an unparalleled act of civic blasphemy. They had officer Sicknick’s remains placed on display in the Capitol rotunda as though he were JFK.

Sicknick’s “murder,” Trump explains, cowed Republicans into silence. To keep them cowed, Biden’s co-conspirators sat on the autopsy report for more than 100 days until forced out by a Judicial Watch law suit. This, Trump insists, was the most ghoulish hoax in American political history. Biden had a dead man murdered.

Biden wasn’t through. His DOJ started rounding up American citizens in the thousands, the great majority of whom did nothing worse than walk in an open door of the People’s House and take selfies. This was the greatest mass injustice against American citizens since Japanese internment, sighs Trump, and it was put in motion by a man who claims to be protecting democracy.

When people began to see through all this mischief, Biden and his henchmen took the one final step needed to turn America into a banana republic. They had their leading political opponent arrested and convicted. At this point, Trump challenges Biden to explain what exactly he was convicted of. Biden cannot begin to answer.

Now Trump turns to the moderators and asks them how many political opponents he had locked up, how many peaceful protestors his DOJ had imprisoned, how many social media platforms he had shut down, how people he had fired for refusing unproven vaccines or speaking out at school board meetings or using the wrong pronouns.

God works in mysterious ways. Biden’s plan to save democracy appears to be actually saving democracy, just not in the way he intended. It has caused ordinary citizens to see what fascism looks like and rise up Donald Trump to combat it. If Trump succeeds in driving this point home, game over.