“Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders,” President Donald Trump swore in his 2025 inaugural address. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.”

Three months later, The White House reiterated the declaration: “President Trump is Restoring Common Sense to Government.” Sounds great, democratic even — an appeal to shared intuition. And above all, it speaks for itself. But read past the headline and you’ll quickly learn what sense is common in this White House: Trump designated English as the country’s official language and declared the end of what he calls “discriminatory” diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The full list goes on to essentially banning things that weren’t happening — weaponizing the government against citizens and anti-Christian bias at the federal level — diluted with trivial things, like paper straws and the “Gulf of Mexico.”

The decrees are worded in such a way that makes them sound obvious — not dubious. Why wouldn’t a president stand against discrimination, censorship and religious suppression. This way, even those who knows the least about law and politics can agree. In other words, it’s common sense.

See, in Trump-era media and politics, this term has been weaponized. He invokes “common sense” as a shield: not to explain policy or grapple with nuance, but to dismiss critics, sidestep complexity, and above all, flatter supporters into believing they already know enough. It’s less about clarity than about control — taking advantage of ignorance to make it feel like authority and, in turn, shutting down discussion before it starts.

The problem with common sense — as the adage goes — is that it is not so common.

Dating back to the origin of Trump’s common sense campaign, let’s revisit a particular exchange between then-senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller and New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, when he asked Miller to provide proof to his claim that low-skilled immigrants are causing job losses for American citizens.

The two clashed for a moment, before Miller abrasively shifted the conversation, invoking pathos by suggesting it’s a matter of showing compassion to American employees, and like clockwork, he returned to his point: “The reality is that, if you just use common sense — and yes, I will use common sense — the reason why some companies want to bring in more unskilled labor is because they know that it drives down wages and reduces labor costs.”

What Miller, who’s now Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, was doing — swapping data for a phrase that ends the argument — is what scholars call a “thought-terminating cliché.”

“Thought-terminating cliché” was first coined by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1960s work on totalitarian language, but scholars have since found them throughout culture. In 2020, a diverse group of individuals were tasked to solve challenging strategy games as a team, logging each member’s total speaking time and the substance of their ideas. Afterward, they were asked to nominate a group member to a leadership position, and as the researchers suspected, speaking time had — by far — the highest correspondence with leadership emergence, beating out intelligence, agreeableness, openness and game proficiency. Interestingly, the only other trait that came close was gender.

Of course, not all leaders operate destructively. Linguist Amanda Montell investigated the common linguistic features of leaders who run destructive cults. She found the most common feature to be loaded language, and found the next to be the thought-terminating cliché, because of its effectiveness in shutting down critical thinking.

Charles Manson famously countered objections to his claims of an impending race war by saying, “No sense makes sense,” while the leaders of the Heaven’s Gate told skeptics that they lacked “the gift of recognition.” These phrases worked because they ended threatening thoughts. And even though Trump is most likely not going to suggest the country take a ton of drugs in preparation for a mass suicide, his favorite saying functions the same way. It reassures his base that evidence is unnecessary, dissent is elitist and their instinct is all that matters — particularly helpful beliefs for someone who plans to defy the constitution every week in order to further “drain the swamp.”

Trump tells his followers to be proud of their country and to help him help you keep the cities safe — concepts that are easily summarized by “common sense.” End of thought — until it isn’t.

Trump tells his followers that, if you’re in America without citizenship, and have broken an American law, you can no longer reside in America — “common sense immigration laws,” despite the policy not aligning with the constitutional right to due process. Discussions that have been widely debated for decades, not because they’re about common sense topics, but because they require different perspectives, nuances and even exceptions like gun laws, media censorship, abortion, DEI and wealth distribution is boiled down to one phrase.

In February, a reporter raised a concern with Trump regarding how he’d just blamed a plane crash into the Potomac River that killed 67 people, on DEI.

“I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash,” the reporter said.

"Because I have common sense,” Trump said. “And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

What his explanation doesn’t consider is that DEI was never a way to discriminate against qualified candidates just because they happen to be white, heterosexual and/or male. Rather, it was the opposite — established to ensure that equally qualified candidates aren’t overlooked for not being those things.

And before you argue that even the most bigoted employers wouldn’t risk their professionalism in this day in age:

In February, Trump also abruptly fired the 4-star air force general C.Q. Brown as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing him with Gen Dan “Razin” Caine, who retired with three stars, as a lieutenant general. But by statute, the Joint Chief’s chair must come from the top brass. Therefore, according to the formally-established job requirements, Brown fit the bill and Caine did not. Trump’s reasoning boiled down to his promised “DEI” purge — in other words, replacing Black people with white people and gay people with straight people — and one line:

“‘Razin’ Caine. I liked him right from the beginning,” Trump said in late February. “As soon as I heard his name, I said, ‘That’s my guy.’”

See, when holistically considering a complex issue — a program’s purpose, details of those involved coupled with provisions already in place, what’s common sense becomes far less sensible. But when intentionally terminating critical thought by skipping over details like data, nuance or consequence, the result is a group of people — who might’ve never defended a discriminatory regulation in their life — suddenly defending the replacement of a Black man with an objectively unqualified white man, for no other reason than him being Black. All the while, the group never realizes they’ve been manipulated into doing so.

Then comes amplification — highly-watched networks making the same claims and leave out essential details under the guise of common sense, so their viewers repeat what they’ve heard. Consequently, “common sense” becomes shorthand for moral clarity against the “elites” and experts — discrediting institutions and people who have devoted their lives to providing insight when it’s most needed.

Viewers, readers, followers are then coerced into a new worldview — one that operates without evidence. It’s a pipeline into conspiratorial theorizing. When November comes around, people who might not have ever argued that the moon landing was fake or that Sandy Hook was a set-up, don’t get their children the flu shot, and they’ll vote, not under the guidance of history, science or data, but as they were told to.

Framing dissent as something that complicates what’s obvious is effective, because those buy into it might feel like information is messing with their head — that the reason it sounds convoluted or confusing is not because they don’t understand industry terms, but because the dissent is fake news. Don’t want to think so hard? Don’t have to. It’s common sense — Giving rise to in-group of “normal” people with a basic understanding of how things work vs. out-of-touch intellectuals paid off by “Big [fill in the blank].”

As a result, sure, people are cognitively eased with simple answers, their leader’s authority is hardened and the group’s morale is boosted, but at the end of all of it, policies escape scrutiny, complex crises get flattened and polarization deepens.

Common sense as used by Trump isn’t democratic. A phrase that should unite us in shared reasoning is being used as a weapon to silence reasoning altogether. But when the deployment of the National Guard, deportations of human beings and ability to access healthcare are decided not by evidence but by a phrase, the cost isn’t just rhetorical — it’s your life.