Relevant scholarship on populism and populist political communication routinely assumes (and occasionally illustrates) that, compared to mainstream counterparts, populist leaders in government have a stronger propensity to deceive on a wide range of issues, including leader motivation and character, political ideas and policy plans. Conventionally, this propensity toward deception is argued to be caused by the combination of facilitating contexts (such as deep polarization or epistemic bubbles) and distinctly populist characteristics, such as a tendency to highlight (or create) continuous crises, paint the corrupt elite in the starkest terms, and offer salvatory narratives centering on the populist leader – all of which routinely require disregarding factual information or truthful inquiry. Concurrently, populism scholarship has until recently not focused on how populist incumbents deceive – which types of deceitful narratives do they prefer? When do they lie, bluff, bullshit, evade or omit? Do differences in content or style primarily hinge on individual character, political circumstance, or ‘thick’ ideology? We focus here on investigating populist deceptive communication in the context of foreign policy because foreign policy themes are both central to populist communication as well as a likely playing field for deception (because audiences are often less well informed about foreign policy issues, which means the risk of detection is lower). We do so by means of comparative case studies into deceptive communication of populist incumbents such as Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Alexis Tsipras.