Last week, Canadian singer Shania Twain raised the ire of the American public for telling The Guardian that she would have supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election for his candor. “I would have voted for him because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest,” she told the newspaper, asking: “Do you want straight or polite? Not that you shouldn’t be able to have both. If I were voting, I just don’t want bullshit. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent.”

The irony of Twain’s comments, which she walked back in a series of tweets to the disappointment of our commander in chief, is the legions of lies that march out of his mouth each time it opens. According to The Washington Post’s ongoing tally, as of April 30, 466 days into Trump’s presidency, he’s made 3,001 false or misleading claims. In other words, he’s brought bullshitting to epic new heights, and yet, Twain’s impression of his forthrightness is a common misapprehension.

Like many Americans, the country crooner conflates his crude, simplistic rhetorical style with sincerity. If it doesn’t sound pretty, it’s “telling it like it is,” as the old saying goes. It’s a false equivalency that has a long history in the United States that is tethered, in part, to anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism. It is one of Trump’s most effective—and dangerous—political weapons.

David Niose, the author of Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason, says the appeal of political folksiness or commonness began in the Jacksonian era. “Andrew Jackson was the first regular guy president and he was a kind of response to the more aristocratic, elitist founding fathers,” he tells me. In the founding era, Niose notes, it was only property-owning white men who could vote, which was a very small segment of the population. Coinciding with Jackson’s arrival, the right to vote was extended to free (white) men in most jurisdictions, which he says “really expanded the base into the more regular guy crowd. Ever since then, folksy politics have always sold in America.”

Examples from American presidential history, he says, include the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story of Abraham Lincoln, born in a humble log cabin to a poor family in Kentucky; Dwight Eisenhower beating Adlai Stevenson twice by, in part, scorning “egghead” intellectuals; and George W. Bush’s proud anti-intellectualism (remember his failed pronunciation of nuclear? One scholar argues he knew how to say it all along) and contrived persona as a down-home Texan rancher, despite being born into extreme wealth like Trump. “It’s all part of what’s become a tradition in American politics of pitching down toward the lowest common denominator instead of trying to present oneself as intelligent and articulate,” Niose explains, “and it seems to be an effective way to run for office.”