As historian Randall Balmer explained at Religion News Service, the sleight of hand regarding the timeline was only the beginning of the mendacity religious right leaders brought to their campaign against Carter.

It's almost like a magician, sleight of hand.

There’s a kind of sleight of hand: I’m very vulnerable in the process and then, by the time it’s out there and people are asking, “How could you bare your soul?,”

In Zehme’s depiction, Carson’s public persona was a deception, a sleight of hand befitting a man who started as a magician and never lost his love for it.

Companies use a kind of mathematical sleight of hand called mass balance to inflate the recycledness of their most lucrative products by taking credit for the recycled content of other, less lucrative products.