Smoke and Mirrors

The phrase derives from a literal magic technique dating to at least 1770 — a hidden magic lantern projected images through a mirror onto a cloud of smoke, famously deployed by showman Johann Georg Schröpfer to conjure ghostly apparitions. The figurative idiom entered the language in 1975, when journalist Jimmy Breslin described Watergate-era politics as a theater of "mirrors and blue smoke" in How the Good Guys Finally Won. Abbreviated and flipped, the phrase became standard political commentary by the late 1970s.