How to Use demagogic in a Sentence

demagogic

adjective
  • His victory on the back of a divisive, demagogic campaign set off protests in cities across the country.
    Jack Holmes, Esquire, 15 Nov. 2016
  • In leftist Hollywood’s typically demagogic fashion, King and Kemp proffer the post-Obama idea that the past was equal to or worse than the present.
    Armond White, National Review, 7 Apr. 2021
  • The ads are brutal, foul, racist, demagogic, and effective.
    Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer, 3 Nov. 2017
  • Trump’s demagogic use of social media has been a blight on American democracy for years, of course, but the stakes are now bigger than ever.
    John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 27 May 2020
  • The logic behind [the hard-liners’] argument is flawed and demagogic.
    Ramin Mostaghim, latimes.com, 19 July 2017
  • Wary observers say that Bukele has followed a demagogic playbook.
    Soudi Jiménez, Los Angeles Times, 26 Feb. 2021
  • But these fleeting jabs were fair response to their targets’ demagogic sniping.
    Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 28 Feb. 2020
  • The demagogic radio-station owner now runs the country.
    George Packer, The Atlantic, 18 Apr. 2020
  • But the low-down and demagogic approach is effective — otherwise, people wouldn’t adopt it.
    Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 6 Sep. 2021
  • Such statements have struck many liberals as demagogic rhetoric piled atop a horrific crime.
    Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon, New York Times, 26 Feb. 2024
  • The deposition would not be a day at the beach, but the investigators doing the questioning tend to be less demagogic than the pols performing at public hearings.
    Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 11 Jan. 2024
  • That fits right into the Trump agenda, which has always been a mix of corporate tax breaks, demagogic rabble-rousing, and de-regulation.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 3 Apr. 2024
  • Yet the reaction of the city’s political leaders ranged from lethargic to misinformed and even demagogic.
    Jon Talton, The Seattle Times, 15 Sep. 2017
  • The machinery of demagogic authoritarianism may shift from decade to decade and century to century, taking us from the scroll to the newsreel to the tweet, but its content is always the same.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 13 Jan. 2017
  • The response of America to both Trumps—the puppet politician who is just repeating what his military advisers are telling him and the demagogic racist—was essentially the same: meh.
    Jeet Heer, New Republic, 24 Aug. 2017
  • Other governments in Latin America and Europe with far less demagogic leadership oversaw covid death rates worse than that of Brazil.
    Washington Post, 22 Oct. 2021
  • And as in the United States a year ago, the opposition’s best hope of defeating the demagogic incumbent rests with an old stalwart of the left who is trying to kindle nostalgia for more civil and prosperous times.
    Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times, 21 Dec. 2021
  • But after two appellate courts made much of Trump’s penchant for overheated, demagogic language, the Supreme Court ruled that the president has the power to restrict immigration.
    Chris Stirewalt, Fox News, 26 June 2017
  • Kuma, a constant source of paradoxes and ironies, often makes demagogic statements on behalf of his own brand of architectural modesty.
    Nikil Saval, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2018
  • All these choices are demagogic, geared toward endearing the electorate.
    Armond White, National Review, 22 Dec. 2021
  • That the filter bubbles that Facebook has created and nurtured have made a lot of people in this country susceptible to fake news, to propaganda, to demagogic appeals.
    Isaac Chotiner, Slate Magazine, 5 Oct. 2017
  • T'Kuvma's demagogic leaning and interest in racial purity connect to current social issues, as the original series did in the '60s.
    Bill Keveney, USA TODAY, 24 Sep. 2017
  • People don’t know how to confront these evils, which come in nearly every direction, in the form of theological zealots, demagogic populists, avowed racists, and trollish misogynists.
    Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, 6 July 2018
  • Disaster would come, Bryce believed, at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base.
    Jon Meacham, Town & Country, 30 Sep. 2020
  • The high-minded English press had been revolutionized in 1896 by the arrival of The Daily Mail, cheap, demagogic, jingoistic, and soon outselling every other paper.
    Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The New York Review of Books, 19 Oct. 2022
  • Critics of Erdogan’s demagogic rule suggest his intransigence now ought to raise questions about Turkey’s place within the alliance.
    Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 20 May 2022
  • His presidency reflected something old and something new in U.S. political life, an appeal to a tradition of angry nativism and the advent of a demagogic style unseen before in the White House.
    Washington Post, 15 Jan. 2021
  • Roughly seventy years ago the left's forebears made precisely the same move when confronted with an overly zealous, demagogic critic of communism.
    Damon Linker, The Week, 25 June 2021
  • Playing on the darkest fears of Democrats and layering on the adjectival overkill, Biden blatantly distorted Republican state-level election laws in a frankly demagogic speech.
    Rich Lowry, National Review, 16 July 2021
  • Silvio Berlusconi, the demagogic former Prime Minister of Italy, was forced to perform community service after his 2013 conviction for tax fraud.
    Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'demagogic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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