President Donald Trump is planning to exploit a terrorist attack. He made that explicit recently when he lashed out at federal judge James Robart for blocking his ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries:

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017

This tweet was the clearest signal yet that Trump intends not only to absolve himself of responsibility for any future terrorist attacks, but also to fault his opponents for any such carnage. In addition to the judiciary, he’s preemptively blaming the media. “It’s gotten to a point where it is not even being reported and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press does not want to report it,” he said this week, inaccurately. “They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

Trump will implicate his political opponents, too. Democrats need to prepare for this. “Since Trump is preemptively trying to insulate himself from blame for terrorist attacks,” the New Republic’s Jeet Heer wrote on Monday, “it’s up to the Democrats and the broader anti-Trump coalition to push a counter-narrative immediately.” The obvious counter-narrative is that Trump—according to a wide variety of national security expects—is not making America safer, but rather more vulnerable to terrorism.

At least one elected Democrat is already pushing this message. At last Saturday’s Congressional Progressive Caucus retreat in Baltimore, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state raised the issue in a room full of liberal lawmakers planning their political strategy.

“We have to be thinking about what is our jiu-jitsu move ... if something does happen.”

“There’s another thing that’s going to throw us off message, and that’s if we have any kind of an attack or a war,” she said. “I just want us to be thinking about that because there are lots of things that are happening right now that you could argue are setting us up for an attack. I believe that’s true of the executive orders, and we know what happened after 9/11, and we have to be thinking about what is our jiu-jitsu move to actually prepare the stage so that if something does happen it’s clear who created that and who created the environment for that to happen.”