The Dangerous Lie Behind Trump’s “Dictator for a Day” Comments

Everyone knows that politics involves more truth-stretching than most professions. As the line (often misattributed to Mark Twain) goes: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”

It’s also a well–established truism that populist politicians lie even more than conventional politicians. This is in part because populism requires fomenting, exploiting, or maintaining a high level of public anger. If you tell the crowd that an issue is complicated, that solutions come with trade-offs or that your well-intentioned opponents make some fair points, there’s a danger the mob will grow bored and lose interest in you. But if you tell them the solutions are obvious and easy, and that your villainous enemies are stopping you from fixing everything, well, that’s more like it.

What gets less attention is how the deceptions of conventional politicians also create market opportunities for demagogues.

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