How populist leaders like Trump use ‘common sense’ as an ideological weapon to undermine facts

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, left, is part of a ‘revolution of common sense’ led by President Donald Trump. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s “the revolution of common sense,” President Donald Trump announced in his second inaugural address.

And so it is. The latest installment of that assertion came in his Jan. 30, 2025, press conference about the Potomac plane crash. When asked how he had concluded that diversity policies were responsible for a crash that was still under investigation, Trump responded, “Because I have common sense, OK?”

“Common sense” is what’s known to scholars as a “lay epistemology,” or how regular people make sense of the world. We don’t rely on statistical evidence or expert research while we’re buying lettuce or driving in traffic. Instead, we’re guided by direct experience, emotions and intuition.

Because it comes from regular people and not institutions that some people deem to be “corrupt,” champions of common sense suggest it leads to a purer form of truth.

President Donald Trump is asked how he could conclude that DEI policies caused the Potomac plane crash.

Yet it is precisely because it comes from personal observations and intuition that research shows common sense is steeped in bias and often leads us astray.

Populist leaders like Trump commonly celebrate common sense and attack expertise and evidence. Populism is less about being liberal or conservative than it is a way of appealing to the public. These appeals are based on a moral separation between the corrupt, bad people with cultural power and the good, pure people who hold the right values – like faith in common sense over expertise and evidence.

And with the new Trump administration, the elevation of common sense as a virtue has been quick and broad.

Dusty boots vs. elite credentials

In his confirmation hearing for the position of secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth pointed to “dust on his boots” as evidence of his qualifications, in contrast to the elite credentials of past defense secretaries, who have often been Washington insiders.

Hegseth couldn’t name members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an alliance of countries playing a crucial role in global security. But he did show that he knew the diameter of the rounds that fit in the magazine of an M4 rifle.

That was evidence that he was, in his words, “a change agent. Someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives.”

Even Meta’s announcement that it would roll back expert fact-checking on its U.S. social media platforms reflects a “lay epistemic” shift.

Meta explained that fact-checkers, “like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives” and that these biases had made fact-checking “a tool to censor.”

Instead, the company would embrace a community notes model where users could provide additional information on posts, which Meta argued would be “less prone to bias.”

“We’ve seen this approach work on X,” wrote Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, “where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.”

This policy change is probably less of a shift in Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s principles than a change made out of necessity. Given Trump’s penchant for falsehoods, I imagine Meta’s previous policy would soon have proved financially and politically inconvenient.

Regardless, the result is a populist’s dream: the demotion of formal expertise in favor of “common sense.”

When asked whether he knew the members of a regional security alliance, defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth was stumped.

Common sense is ideological

For the past two decades, the rise in social media, combined with declining trust in formal news organizations, has democratized knowledge: the sense that no one person or institution has special access to truth – not scholars with many degrees, not experts armed with scientific evidence or data, and definitely not journalists.

In a 2020 study of public sentiment across 20 countries, Pew Research Center found that the overwhelming majority of those surveyed, 66%, reported trusting people with “practical experience” to solve problems over experts. Only 28% trusted the experts to solve problems.

If institutions and experts are perceived as corrupt and ideological, the only truth that we can trust is what comes from our own eyes and our own minds.

But does common sense bring us to truth? Sometimes, yes. It’s also appealing: Since our observations of the world are informed by our values and beliefs, we often see what we want – such as diversity-hiring initiatives known as “DEI” causing a plane crash, for example.

And our intuition rarely tells us we’re wrong. This helps account for the existence of confirmation bias, which is our tendency to see and remember things that tell us we’re right. This is also why, even in those rare instances when facts change minds, they rarely change hearts. If we do update our knowledge with correct information, research has shown that our gut will still tell us our overall view of the world was right.

Ironically, studies also show that the more a person trusts common sense, the more likely they are to be wrong.

My research has shown that the people most likely to believe misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 election were those who placed more trust in intuition and emotion, and less trust in evidence and data. In addition, the more people liked Donald Trump, the more they valued intuition and emotion – and rejected evidence and data.

So, common sense is ideological.

When our pathway to knowledge is limited by our experiences and intuition, we’re not actually looking for truth. We’re happy with whatever answers are available, including conspiracy theories or explanations that make us feel good and right.

We blame individuals – especially people we don’t like or identify with – for their own misfortune. We tend to think “those people should be better and try harder” instead of looking for public policy solutions to problems such as poverty or drug addiction. Without evidence and data summarizing large trends – such as cancer rates tracked through National Institutes of Health funding or ocean temperatures tracked by National Science Foundation funding – we are limited to what we can see through our own eyes and biases.

And our limited observations merely reinforce our underlying beliefs: “My neighbor probably has breast cancer from taking that medicine I don’t like” or “Today is probably just a randomly hot day.” We’ll either overgeneralize from or downplay these limited examples depending on what our “common sense” says.

So, when populists elevate common sense as a virtue, it’s not just to celebrate how regular people understand the world. It’s to promote a worldview that rejects verifiable facts, exaggerates our biases, and paves the way for even more propaganda to come.

Dannagal G. Young was a co-investigator on an NIH grant that provided funding for one of the studies referenced in this piece.