Joe Manchin is as plainspoken as the day is long. He is a serious guy who does not like to waste time playing games. He has spent his entire career in defense of common sense. We know this because Manchin tells us as much on the first page of “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense,” a new book that is part memoir, part manifesto (Manchinfesto?), part compendium of folksy and occasionally tautological aphorisms. The last of these are scattered throughout the text, in bold font: “You can always do better.” “The road to success is always under construction.” “When people stop caring, the only ones left are those who don’t care.”

This pompous and wholly uninsightful tome groans under the weight of such language—the next time I hear someone use the phrase “every cliché in the book,” I’ll assume that this is the book they’re talking about—but the notion of “common sense” gets a particularly heavy workout. In addition to including it in the subtitle, Manchin says that his father rolled it together with “street sense” and “business sense” to forge principles that stuck with him for life. Manchin runs for governor of West Virginia, in 1996, on a platform of “common sense and practical solutions”; he doesn’t get past the primary, but later, after finally becoming governor and then being elected to the United States Senate, he backs commonsense approaches to guns, congressional accounting practices, voting rights, and an ethics reform that would have banned senators from campaigning to unseat their colleagues. On the second page of the book, he condenses his “commonsense politics,” which he is “thoroughly convinced that the majority of people in our country share,” into a brief list: “Put people first and country before party. Be fiscally responsible and socially compassionate. That’s it.”

There’s nothing revelatory in pointing out that “common sense” is highly subjective—what embodies it for one person is, to another, idiocy—or that it has long been used to give contentious claims a sheen of self-evident rationality and popular legitimacy; in the United States, politicians have been doing as much since before the states were united. (See: Paine, Thomas: “Common Sense,” 1776.) But the centrist gloss that Manchin puts on the concept—the idea that common sense is the preserve of an increasingly disenfranchised moderate middle, and “can’t be weaponized like the extremes”—comes off, in our current moment, as a dangerous delusion. As we speak, it is being weaponized, in extreme ways.

Last August, I wrote about the term “election interference,” and how its meaning had become obscured as different actors lobbed it across the political divide. By way of example, I pointed to a bizarre exchange of recriminations in Washington State, where Bob Ferguson, a Democratic candidate for governor, decried as interference the recruitment of other people named Bob Ferguson to run against him, while himself being accused of interference for trying to outmaneuver them on the ballot. Around the time that my article appeared, Democrats in Georgia expressed alarm that Trump-allied officials on a state election board had opened the door to post-election interference by implementing new certification rules. The chair of the state Republican Party defended the board’s moves as “common-sense changes.”

Since then, as was the case with “election interference,” different politicians have brandished “common sense” to very different ends. Kamala Harris pledged to seek “common sense solutions” if elected President; Democratic-leaning critics blamed her defeat on her party’s (real or perceived) abandonment thereof, on issues ranging from trans participation in sports to the use of the word “Latinx.” This month, a Democrat running for governor in Kansas and a Republican running for Senate in Iowa both cited common sense as they promoted their campaigns. Last week, the O.G. Bob Ferguson, now the governor of Washington, blasted the federal government for failing, thus far, to extend “common-sense tax credits” under the Affordable Care Act.

But, as was also the case with “election interference,” Donald Trump’s recent use of “common sense” overshadows all others’. He has extolled the idea throughout his careers in business and politics, but seemed to really lean in during his 2024 campaign, using the term repeatedly to describe not only his agenda but the Republican Party as a whole. In his Inaugural Address, Trump hailed the dawn of a “revolution of common sense” that has since, well, revolutionized paper straws, the Gulf of Mexico, NATO, the Kennedy Center, forestry protections, federal procurement, office-space management, school discipline, truck-driving regulations, and more. Shortly after he took office, his Administration directed immigration agents to use their “common sense” as it permitted them to arrest people in churches and schools; last week, an official complained that a California bill barring agents from wearing masks while engaging with the public defies “common sense.” “I’m not a dictator,” Trump said last month (after suggesting that some Americans might nonetheless like to have one). “I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”

In February, Carlos Lozada, of the New York Times, published a smart column breaking down the different rhetorical ways in which Trump has weaponized the idea of common sense. In part, the President has used the term like every other politician does—to automatize the righteousness of contestable claims. But he has invoked it in darker ways, too. Following the Pulse night-club shooting, in 2016, Trump said that “common sense” might call for profiling Muslims in the U.S., even though, he claimed, he personally didn’t like the idea—a “pretense of reluctance,” Lozada wrote, that painted him as a realist who “would rather be guided by his better angels.” Around the same time, Trump conflated “common sense” with “honesty,” as if to suggest that his opponents were not only wrong but lying. Ultimately, in Trump’s world, it isn’t so much that he does things that are common sense—it’s that things become common sense when he does them. The consequences of this can be frightening. When the journalist Jonathan Karl pointed out to Trump that his supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol on January 6th, Trump replied that Pence—who, as Vice-President, was responsible for overseeing the certification of election results in the Senate—should have had the “common sense” not to “pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress.” (Pence had no power to block the vote, which, obviously, was not fraudulent.)