Does hyperbole win elections? If so, how?
​Here’s a starting point:
A Google search “Hillary Clinton hyperbole” showed approximately 237,000 results.
and
“Donald Trump hyperbole” yielded about 382,000 results.
Can anyone think of a really powerful hyperbole by Hillary Clinton?
If not, for the time being at least, the loser is
                                               Hillary R. Clinton.
​

                                                                           THE NEW WINNER IS  
                                                                       Marcus Fabius Quintilianus,
 who in his Institutes of Oratory  8.6. 68.
cites a stomach-turning hyperbole by Cicero
“In hyperbole we may say more than the actual facts, as when Cicero attacks an enemy by saying, "He vomited and filled his lap and the whole tribunal with fragments of food.”
        Can you top that! Post your entries as comments on this blog. 

​     Sorry, all you contestants who submitted quotations from Donald Trump in the first day of the Hyperbole of the Day contest. Trump hyperboles, which once were worth a dime a dozen, have fallen in value to a dime  a gross - and many of them are indeed gross.
   And so, THE WINNER IS –
    Peter H. Burian
The award is for this passage from W.H. Auden “As I walked out one Evening”:
 
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,”
There’s more to the poem, of course, and irony, too.  “Tons more,” as any good hyperbolist would say.
   Keep trying, aspiring hyperbolists! The contest continues.

​The Hyperbole of the Day Contest
Is Donald Trump a demagogue or a populist?  That questions brought me back to studying demagogy.  But as I was finishi8ng the article which has now appeared  as the cover story in the Spring American Scholar,  I saw more and more clearly  that demagogy, ancient and modern, was best understood as a form of political discourse, not  as a set of policies.  Maybe I didn’t make that as clear as I should have in my book on the demagogues, The New Politicians of Fifth Century Athens. So I am now turning my attention to hyperbole, a key ingredient in the discourse of demagogy.
Will you help by posting here your favorite hyperbole. It doesn’t have to be from Trump but he sure is a wonderful source of them
PS   Click here  the link to my American Scholar. article, “Populist or Demagogue?”.