foil

“Friendships can be a mirror for yourself,” she says, calling close pals “a foil for ourselves.”

His media career blossomed as a jovial foil to the tough-talking, former Manchester United captain Roy Keane on Sky Sports' Super Sunday.

“Madden made for an expansive, excessive, endlessly voluble analyst, and Summerall provided his perfect play-by-play foil,” Times reporter Scott Collins wrote in an appreciation after Summerall’s death in 2013.

“The state of California is a mess,” Trump said in September, using us as a foil, but also as a springboard, casting a global economic powerhouse as a failure, a sanctuary cesspool and a symbol of wretchedly woke excess.

As the liberal antithesis to conservative dogma on abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, California is naturally poised to reprise the role the state played during the first Trump presidency as a GOP foil and protector of Democratic values.