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.
You probably heard that Donald Trump, Republican presidential front runner, recently said he’d be a “dictator” on day one of his presidency. Given the growing chatter about how a second Trump presidency would become a dictatorship, Trump’s comment threw the commentariat into a tizzy. Whether he was joking or deadly serious or something in between, saying you’ll be a dictator for any amount of time is no laughing matter, particularly for a former president who likes to test-drive real desires by pretending he’s joking.
If you put aside the word dictator for a moment, this promise is sadly banal. Presidential candidates have a habit of dishonestly vowing they can do all manner of things unilaterally on “day one” of their presidencies. In 2020, for example, Kamala Harris repeatedly promised that if elected, she’d repeal Trump’s tax cuts on her first day, despite the fact that presidents cannot single-handedly repeal laws. No wonder voters think presidents have powers they don’t have.