Sure. It's a classic rhetorical technique, and the conditions for it to work are well known. It's a variant of "trust me", and that works if and only if the au

Sure. It's a classic rhetorical technique, and the conditions for it to work are well known. It's a variant of "trust me", and that works if and only if the audience considers you trustworthy. So it wasn't terribly likely to work for someone like Boris Johnson, whose recent history chiefly consists of using bonmots to deflect blame for a series of failures. But it worked for Angela Merkel six years ago, when she said "wir schaffen das" about an impending crisis, and the great majority trusted her judgment.