Donald Trump is reaching for the stars as he tries to return to Twitter.
In a Monday brief seeking to revive a lawsuit disputing Twitter’s suspension of Trump, the former president’s lawyers likened him to Italian astronomer Galileo.
Trump was banned from the platform in early 2021 after he fomented the attack on the U.S. Capitol with incendiary false claims of election fraud.
Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln when he was president, so perhaps his legal team didn’t think it was a stretch to compare him to Galileo, the so-called “father of modern science” who was persecuted by the Catholic Church in the 17th century for asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun.
“Most people once believed these to be crackpot ideas; many still do. But crackpot ideas sometimes turn out to be true. The earth does revolve around the sun, and it was Hunter Biden, not Russian disinformation agents, who dropped off a laptop full of incriminating evidence at a repair shop in Delaware,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, per Politico. “Galileo spent his remaining days under house arrest for spreading heretical ideas, and thousands of dissidents today are arrested or killed by despotic governments eager to suppress ideas they disapprove of. But this is not the American way.”
The brief was filed in San Francisco, where his lawsuit seeking damages and reinstatement to Twitter was denied in May.
“We want him to have the right to get back on” Twitter, Trump attorney John Coale told Reuters on Monday.
Twitter said last year it suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” after a mob of followers laid siege to the Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
