Throughout political campaigns, it is clear that politicians used many different methods of flattery in order to gain their followings. This can be shown through personality cults used to self-promote through the political order, but also as manipulative and antidemocratic exploitation of epideictic rhetoric. A personality cult is defined as “a political legitimation strategy that functions to secure a leader’s position in the absence of democratic methods of legitimation, most strikingly by using ‘excessive flattery and adulation [. . .] of the leader’(Cassiday and Johnson, 2010; Sperling, 2016)” Flattery is most commonly called manipulative which can lead to negative consequences.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09579265211023224
