Charismatic politicians, like Bill Clinton, seem capable of temporarily but genuinely convincing themselves that their current interlocutor, maybe a small businessperson concerned about tariffs, is the only person in the entire world they care about, and to give them what appears to be their full attention, even while part of their brain might be intent on the big donor across the room. There is some evidence that psychopaths, the ultimate social defectors, are able to suppress genuine emotional “leakage,”59 contributing to their creepy ability to stone-cold lie.
