To secure power in a crisis, leaders must sell deep change as a means to future good. But how could we know the future? In her new book Out of Joint: Power Crisis and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale, 2019) Assoc. Professor Nomi Claire Lazar draws on stories across a range of cultures and contexts, ancient and modern, to show how leaders use constructions of time to frame events. These rhetorical frames carry an implicit promise to secure or subvert an expected future, shaping belief in what is possible—and what is inevitable. In this talk, Professor Lazar will show how this theory of ‘temporal framing’ illuminates the rhetoric of populist leaders in particular. Using this tactic, they unsettle future expectations, clearing the way for narratives of a grand, heroic rise.