In 1589, Venice was facing a major crisis. The Ottoman Empire to the east and the maritime routes of the Spanish and Portuguese with America to the west were suffocating trade and its privileged position in the Mediterranean. The Most Serene Republic needed new income to avoid bankruptcy. It longed for an economic miracle, and the miracle arrived. It had a name: Marco Bragadino. With a eloquence equivalent to that of a gifted Argentine orator of our time, this man announced that he could solve Venetian problems thanks to his alchemy knowledge. He made a demonstration in front of the city's nobles: he took a piece of metal, sprinkled it with a strange substance - whose ingredients he refused to reveal - and showed, after purifying it, a gold nugget. Such power, which guaranteed to rescue the Venetian Treasury, was not cheap. The nobles, as desperate as fascinated, agreed to all his demands, no matter how eccentric they were, such as living in a palace or receiving the salary of a minister.
The expense did not matter: Venice was going to haggle its way out of decadence thanks to Bragadino.
After a year, our protagonist secretly left the city of canals, fearing attacks from those who doubted his talent for transmutation of matter and who had revealed that Bragadino was not who he claimed to be, an illegitimate son of a famous deceased Venetian condottiero. His real name was Mamugnà, and his origin was Cypriot. He marched north in search of a new opportunity and soon managed to charm the Duke of Bavaria with his golden wonders. But the Germans of the past, like those of the present, are less patient than the Italians. Bragadino was executed as a charlatan in the Munich market square. It took effort. The executioner needed three blows to decapitate him.
The Bragadinos of the world have always appeared on the margins of society, trying to thrive while waiting to assault a gullible or greedy community in a specific territory. However, their Venice turns out to be the whole world today. The explosion of charlatans filling the public sphere is one of the most striking features of an era that gives rise to a surprising number of beliefs, hopes, and desires.
This is argued by Moisés Naím, director for more than a decade of the magazine Foreign Policy, columnist and former minister of Venezuela, who has written, together with journalist Quico Toro, the essay Charlatans (Ed. Debate). A book dedicated to the role of charlatans in manipulating masses and markets. "Previously, these characters were limited to a very specific geography, now they are international," explains Naím via video call. "Thanks to technology, many have become viral and global." Examples of them are the Dutch self-realization master Bentinho Massaro, the emotional healer Teal Swan, or the sect to find your "twin flame."
According to Argentine anthropologist Irina Podgorny, the logic of the scam of these individuals is the same, what has changed is the scale. Before, lead was turned into gold, and today entrepreneurship advice is sold to become a millionaire in three months. Before, a hair growth tonic was sold, and today a miraculous diet to banish fat effortlessly. Before, one traveled by wagon, today they navigate through Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
"Charlatans are historically linked to the early adoption of innovations and important means that emerged in the modern age," explains Podgorny, author of Charlatanry and scientific culture (La Catarata) and Charlatans. Chronicles of incurable remedies (Eterna Cadencia de Buenos Aires). "They used the printing press to advertise their cures, optical devices like telescopes to show great 'wonders' at fairs, and cinema to turn expeditions and archaeology into a spectacle, always mixing science, adventure, and visual storytelling."
Virality has been the decisive impulse that has turned many charlatans into highly successful populist politicians. What Bragadino dreamed of achieving in Venice is something that, in 2026, sounds like a modest ambition. "We live in a golden age for charlatans," says Moisés Naím.
Proof of this is the ghost that haunts the pages of his book, which is none other than Donald Trump. We are talking about the greatest, the one who has gone the furthest within this group of talented charlatans, at least in contemporary history.
"The similarities between a snake oil salesman and the current political charlatan are enormous: both simplify a problem, play with their victims' limited verification capacity, and offer miraculous solutions," says Inés Olza, a researcher in Linguistics at the Institute of Culture and Society of the University of Navarra. "Their work consists of new recipes for a known dish. They can put on new disguises, but the discursive mechanism is the same."
That Trump is a charlatan is not an ideological judgment but a fact. Trump is the best of all because he has popular support and dominates a fundraising technique. According to an investigation by The New Yorker, his family has been able to earn $3.4 billion throughout his political career. The largest income comes from the cryptocurrency sector, which has generated $2.4 billion for them.
But Trump's charlatan style to make money goes way back. In 2004, he founded Trump University, an educational project that offered undergraduate, graduate, and even doctoral degrees. This despite authorities warning him that he could not use the term university because it did not meet the strict requirements in the US. But Trump did not shut it down. On the contrary, he promoted its educational excellence that provided access to the alleged formulas that had led its famous founder to succeed in the business world.
In his sworn testimony, the salesperson Ronald Schnackenberg revealed that, in reality, the foundations of Trump's university promoted "a scam that constantly forced selling something else." The first mandate they received from above was to get students to pay $1,500 for a seminar completely devoid of content, then in that same course, they were sold the elite seminar for $35,000, where they were actually taught magical investment tips. And if they accepted that fee, more money had to be extracted from them with never-ending products: from books to confidential notes. There was always another step in the wisdom of the Trump method.
"Charlatans are historically linked to the early adoption of innovations," says anthropologist Irina Podgorny
Many of the students' complaints are still mired in eternal legal processes due to Trump's legion of lawyers. It is estimated that the president paid $40 million in legal services in just six months to address all the cases that corner him. The best part is that this money has barely come out of his fortune. Like a good charlatan, he funds these fees with donations from his followers.
Trump being the first to reach such heights does not mean he is the only one. According to the authors of Charlatans, Berlusconi is the "patient zero" of this era of uncertainty we live in, someone who discovered that gaining electoral support required the same commercial technique as selling dishwasher detergent. Although perhaps the most blatant case of the success of a chorus of charlatans was the Brexit in 2016. Those who lied the most to the electorate with false information in that campaign, gained the most political advantage. Boris Johnson became prime minister, while the indefatigable Nigel Farage, a British populist leader, could soon end up in Downing Street, according to some polls.
In 2026, there is enough data to create a profile of the political charlatan. Naím and Toro describe it: Almost all of them are said to be charming, perhaps superficial. They pretend to be very intelligent, have a superlative ego, and build their empire by selling their merits and talents in an exaggerated way. They never feel empathy for those they destroy, are irascible if contradicted, and greatly enjoy sex. They focus on the immediate, and when they think long-term, they derail.
Another peculiar phenomenon of this golden age of the manipulator is that many of their successes have been achieved thanks to their immersion in the culture wars of the last decade. They have understood before anyone else that the best fuel for manipulation is polarization. Because with this relentless tension, their victims ask fewer questions.
"It's easy for a ruthless person to manipulate partisan dreams to gain benefits or power," Naím argues. "That's why the culture war in the US is one of the biggest breeding grounds for charlatans in the world."
They exist on every ideological spectrum. The charlatan is flexible and, when it suits them, can be right-wing, left-wing, or centrist. These are two examples in the promised land of swindlers on both sides of the ideological Mississippi.
On the most reactionary end, Brian Kolfage is the most fascinating. We're talking about a disabled war veteran from the Iraq War who set up several far-right forums that, according to the judges, were veritable fake news machines. But that wasn't his best charlatan creation.
In 2018, Kolfage sold his community an idea and, even better, a slogan: "We Build the Wall." According to his arguments, if progressives in Washington were going to withhold funds to prevent Trump from building the wall with Mexico he had promised in his first presidential campaign, he would raise money privately. During his campaign, he raised one billion euros from his enthusiastic supporters. The problem was, he had no intention of building anything. In 2022, he went to prison convicted of donor fraud.
Even more sophisticated was the scam perpetrated by anti-racist activists Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, who created a radical organization advocating woke ideology. How did it work? They would get people to pay them $2,500 to come to their homes and show them and their white friends how racist they were. If their clients admitted to having a Black friend, they were reprimanded. For Jackson and Rao, that was just a cover for their supposed hidden supremacism. They were even more furious if they confessed to donating money to an anti-racism NGO. For them, that gesture was nothing more than a miserable way to atone for your sins and those of your slave-owning ancestors. You were human garbage, but they could cure you. If you paid, of course.
What would Marco Bragadino have achieved today with the help of the digital world? Perhaps he would have three million followers on social media, he would have artificially inflated his own cryptocurrency—called, let's say, the Bragadicoin—and he might even be living in the Quirinal Palace in Rome. Today he would be an entrepreneur, a YouTuber, and the President of the Italian Republic.