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President Trump’s rapid-fire policy actions are reshaping the federal government, and to Fox News, they are simply pursuing “common sense.”
Enacting “bold and sometimes painful measures” is worth it, one Fox News host said, to arrive at “common sense.” Mr. Trump’s term so far, another Fox pundit concluded, could be summed up with that simple catchphrase: It’s a “restoration of common sense.”
“Trump isn’t radical — he’s just radically changing our country back to normal,” Jesse Watters said during Monday’s episode of “Jesse Watters Primetime.” He said Mr. Trump’s plans to “deport migrants” and cut waste were “all common-sense moves.”
The flood of “common sense” comments on Fox News echoes the language Mr. Trump and his new administration have used to justify his policies — many of which have deeply divided the country, polls have shown. The administration has deployed the slogan to support a range of actions, from banning paper straws to reversing efforts to stem climate change, and has described his first weeks as a “revolution in common sense.”
“It’s easy to do a good job when you are acting on common sense and you are speaking the truth,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, at a recent briefing.
The shared language reflects the deepening ties between the government and the right-wing media, especially Fox News, by far the nation’s most popular cable news network. Nearly 20 former Fox News alumni have joined the administration, including at the highest levels, with the former hosts Pete Hegseth taking over the Pentagon and Sean Duffy leading the Transportation Department. Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, has received her own show on the network.
Harrison Fields, the principal deputy press secretary for the White House, said that “common sense” was not a new term for Mr. Trump.
“No polling is needed to know that President Trump’s common sense, America First promises are wildly popular with the American people — the proof is in his historic victory,” Mr. Fields said.
The suggestion from Fox News and the White House is that Mr. Trump’s “common sense” policies are not only the right ones but also have wide support among the vast majority of Americans. Polling has offered a more complicated picture.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion — known as D.E.I. — evenly divide the country, according a New York Times and Ipsos poll from January, before his inauguration: 48 percent want to eliminate such programs while 47 percent support them.
The same can be said for parts of Mr. Trump’s Middle East policy. (Mr. Trump has supported aid for Israel, while 53 percent in the same survey said the United States was spending too much to support the country.) Deporting all illegal immigrants, a cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, has a slim majority of support, with 55 percent backing the idea.
Some of Mr. Trump’s other policies are more popular: Most Americans — about 80 percent, including two-thirds of Democrats — said transgender women should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports, according to the January poll. (Mr. Trump signed an executive order barring their participation.) A larger share, about 87 percent, support deporting unauthorized immigrants with a criminal record, the poll found. (Mr. Trump signed a law in January that would deport undocumented immigrants charged with a variety of crimes, from shoplifting to murder.)
Other policies pushed as “common sense” by Mr. Trump and conservative media do not have recent polling to assess their popularity, including ending the penny and requiring a photo ID to vote.
The embrace of “common sense” has surged on Fox News, where the term was mentioned nearly 500 times in January, according to data from Critical Mention, a media monitoring company, an increase from around 200 per month in the years prior.
Some of the mentions on Fox News come from its own “Common Sense Department,” a segment that started airing during the Biden administration and features Trace Gallagher reacting to news based on what “common sense” would dictate.
As Mr. Trump moved to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development, which provides funding for humanitarian programs around the world, protests erupted and Democratic lawmakers held rallies in support of the group.
Mr. Gallagher dismissed the fracas during a segment by highlighting some programs funded by U.S.A.I.D.: “Common sense would not describe this as foreign aid but rather a domestic boondoggle, a multibillion-dollar boondoggle.”
Recent polling shows that a majority of Americans — about 60 percent — support focusing on problems at home rather than abroad, a shift from 2019, when Americans were evenly split on that question. (A poll on foreign aid spending, from 2014, also showed that 95 percent of respondents overestimated or didn’t know how much the United States spent on foreign aid. The correct answer: less than 1 percent of the federal budget.)
Mark Levin, a Fox News host and close ally of Mr. Trump, seemed to recognize the echo between the White House and Fox News when he raised the president’s catchphrase on his show.
“What Trump is proposing is not radical, it’s ‘common sense,’ as he puts it,” Mr. Levin said. “When he says ‘common sense,’ for many of us, it means conservative. Because conservative is common sense.”
Ruth Igielnik and Christine Zhang contributed reporting.
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