pretense

According to prosecutors, Smith-Griffin orchestrated “a deliberate and calculated scheme to deceive investors in AllHere Education, Inc., inflating the company’s financials to secure millions of dollars under false pretenses.”

This time there's no national security pretense or a rationale that people are betraying the country.

But one of them has run a ragged, undisciplined and often listless campaign, increasingly focused on blatantly false claims and hateful invective, and without the slightest pretense of “moderation” or unifying rhetoric.

In the campaign’s final week, Trump returned to New York to feed his ego and the hate of a party that seems to have lost all pretense of wanting a democracy.

During his presidency, he wanted to use the Insurrection Act to command the United States military to crush dissent under the pretense of stopping “political protests” and “riots.”