It’s a favorite cliché of politicians. It’s cover for those pushing any proposal for change. It’s like the “free gift” you will get for just trying our product. It has a nice ring to it. It is totally bullshit.

There can be no such thing as win-win, since the only way you can tell if you are winning is to find a loser to compare yourself with. You can’t win a race in which nobody else is entered. (Although I do have a 65-year-old acquaintance who routinely collects medals from barefoot skiing tournaments because he is the only entrant in his age class.) And there can be neither winners nor losers if there is no race.

Note that the promised benefits of a predicted win-win situation are usually promised to become apparent at some generally rather distant future moment, preferably far enough off so that the promisers will have had time to disassociate themselves from the actual result. If you have already accomplished something you have no need to brag about it — the world will take notice. When you are out to flim-flam your audience you need to do your bragging in advance. But choose your clichés carefully. They must seem to promise, without actually promising.

In politics win-win is an assurance that there is something in your bill for everyone, and therefore it cannot hurt anyone’s chances of re-election. The actual result is most often found to be lose-lose for those people who took the bait. In any political action that involves actual change (which covers every political action more critical than naming a state flower) some people will win and some people will lose.

The political game is, after all, a contest to see who can get his or her hands on the largest portion of the money collected by the taxman (based on the honor system of self-reporting — holy of holies!). If I, as a public servant supposedly with fiduciary responsibility to my constituents, get to save an extra buck by means of a law allowing me to stash my earnings tax free in Luxembourg, it will correspondingly decrease the Treasury’s ability to help you care for your mother in hospice with Alzheimer’s. There is no way to escape that, once we are dealing with a fixed budget. Dollars are fungible. It’s a clear win-lose. And so with every such political choice. It’s not even win-place-show. Losers flat-out lose. Winners buy memberships at Mar-a-Lago at $200,000 a pop. There are no consolation prizes.

So what? Politicians need to have a lot of clichés in their rhetorical quivers, to be plucked forth when one of their favorite scams threatens to come undone.

• “No one will lose his Medicare.”

• “Tax cuts will provide the greatest boom in job creation the world has ever seen.”

• “There has never been a president with so many accomplishments in such a short time.”

• “I will stand up for the little guy.”

• “We are always in favor of full transparency.”

What’s the harm in adding one more? Why do I bother to write about it? What’s new, after all? Well, for one thing I think we are increasingly in danger of letting clichés undermine our capacity for serious thinking. Courtesy of Fox TV we are allowing tangerine-colored hair, long red neckties, and arm candy nepotism to replace the town meetings, public debates, and straightforward reporting I grew up with. Quick, mindless characterizations such as win-win are taking the place of democratic process. (What, for another example, does “She doesn’t even look presidential” mean? Since when is a presidential nomination a casting call?) “I’ll bring back your coal-mining job and kick China’s ass at the same time — an easy win-win” — sounds a lot better than “I’ll bring back your coal-mining job and guarantee your grandchildren miserable deaths from silicosis before they reach the age of fifty.”

A “public enemy” journalist or a “failing” newspaper is one who can be counted on to point this out to the constituents of a politician focused on justifying his campaign contributions from the Koch Brothers. So it behooves the scammer to use a cliché (“fake news”, “worst kind of people I have ever dealt with”) in an attempt to exonerate himself.

The only way to combat this strategy is to ask more questions. Specific questions. Questions with real answers. “How many new houses?” “How many old jobs?” “How many protected dollars for health care?” “Exactly how will you preserve Social Security?” But to do this there must be a forum where losers can interrogate the winners. Daily White House press briefings are but one example. Answers to queries shouted at public officials as they make their brief prairie-dog-like appearances, emerging from closed conference rooms onto public sidewalks before disappearing hurriedly into the Senate Subway are another. Regular presidential press conferences used to be still another. (It is worth observing that we have had exactly one so far in the last sixteen months that didn’t involve the cover of a visiting foreign dignitary or a new unqualified nominee.) The annoying pushiness of the mic-toting wretches in the corridors of the capitol used to be accepted as part of the political process. Replacing these with a daily dose of one-way Twitter feeds, an insulting nickname, and a jutting lower lip is a scary development.

Sure, every president, every legislator, would like to keep his plans secret until he can find the best moment to spring them. (That would ideally be midnight before the no-further-amendments vote on the desperation deadline spending bill, “our last chance to keep the government operating” — until next time.) Reporters worth their salt will fight this, even at the risk of pink slips from their employers. This is what we teach them to do in journalism school. This is not what they teach in the school of hard knocks known as practical politics, where “classified” or “privileged communication” or “off the record” is a shield as cherished as the Church’s index, and as sought after.

The next time you hear “win-win” you can be sure that someone is out to bamboozle someone, and that someone being bamboozled is usually the taxpayer.

For once Trump has it right: there are winners and losers, never just winners and winners.