Rather than revise the ruse of cooperation that he devised to protect his political domain, he blamed corrupted evidence.
What appears particularly objectionable is the ruse itself, which delivers up the unwitting to the caprices of a tyrant who (ab)uses the law.
Efforts made at supposed conciliation were a ruse.
On this gloomy account liberalism is a ruse, the story the ruling classes tell themselves and their subjects.
A ruse was to cheat at the medical by sending a person who looked healthy, or by manipulating blood pressure.
A denial of the clock, of being professionally on-time or amateurishly late, is a disingenuous ruse.
Few if any of his words can be taken at face value, in light of the ruse he is perpetrating, but even if insincere they are cutting.
Bluebeard too, it will be remembered, absents himself from home on a business trip as a ruse to test his prospective or newly-wedded wife.