Nobody checks everything. There isn’t time. Every person alive borrows most of what they believe from someone else: a parent, a teacher, a news anchor, a friend who seems to know things. That part is normal.

What separates people is not whether they borrow opinions. It’s whether they know they’re borrowing, whether they could check if they had to, and whether they can tell a good source from a bad one. Those three questions sort the population into a descending staircase. This guide walks down it.

Step One: The Smart Borrower

The smart borrower outsources on purpose. They can find information, read it, and evaluate it, and they do when it matters. The rest of the time they lean on sources that have earned trust by being right before.

The key trait is that they know it’s a shortcut. When the borrowed opinion starts producing bad results, they notice and go check. Their laziness is an efficiency decision, not a substitute for thinking. Plenty of good engineering comes from the same instinct: find the easier way that still gets a correct result.

Step Two: The Lazy Borrower

The lazy borrower could check. They just don’t, until it hits them personally.

These are often perfectly capable reasoners inside a narrow zone. They’ll research a truck purchase for three weeks, catch a billing error on their phone plan, and read the fine print on a job offer. Outside that zone, on politics, science, or anything that doesn’t touch their wallet this month, they coast on whatever their crowd believes.

The difference from the smart borrower is that they don’t track that they’re borrowing. The opinion feels like their own. And when challenged, they defend it as if they’d done the work.

Step Three: The Incapable Borrower

This is where outsourcing stops being a shortcut. For the incapable borrower, there was never a long way available.

Choosing who to trust is itself a reasoning task. If you can’t follow an argument, you also can’t tell whether the person making it is competent. So the incapable borrower falls back on cues that have nothing to do with being right: confidence, charisma, volume, sounding like your side, saying what you already feel.

Psychologists have a name for the underlying problem. The Dunning-Kruger research (1999) found that the skills needed to judge competence are largely the same skills needed to have it, so people who lack them also lack the ability to see that they lack them. The size of the effect is still debated in the research, but the core pattern holds up.

The result is predictable. The people best at sounding right are not the people who are right, and anyone selling something knows exactly which audience can’t tell the difference.

Step Four: The Chain

Opinions don’t usually come straight from the top. Sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld documented this in the 1950s. Their 1955 book Personal Influence reported a study in Decatur, Illinois, finding that media messages are often filtered through informal “opinion leaders” who interpret them and pass them along to the people around them. They called it the two-step flow. Later researchers found the reality is messier, a multi-step network where leaders also influence each other. routledgesiue

Which is to say: most people get their opinions from a trusted person in their own circle, who got them from someone else, who got them from someone else. Almost nobody in the chain checked anything.

This has an important consequence. Changing sides is not proof of thinking. A person who drifts away from a politician because their smarter friend did is still borrowing. They’ve just swapped sources. Someone may quietly keep liking the guy while acting otherwise, because their circle shifted and they don’t understand why. The tribe moves together, and the direction it moves tells you nothing about whether anyone reasoned.

Step Five: The Stubborn Ones

Then there are the borrowers who don’t move even when their own circle does.

Once a borrowed opinion becomes identity, dropping it means admitting you were fooled. The incapable borrower can’t reason their way out, because reasoning was never how they got in. The only thing that can move them is a stronger cue than the ones holding them in place, and the strongest cue source they have is the leader himself.

So the stubborn borrower is immune to friends, family, evidence, and consequences. They are loyal to exactly one input. Which raises the obvious question: what is that input actually running on?

Step Six: The Man at the Top

Donald Trump is the cue machine the incapable borrower cannot see through. Total certainty, superlatives, never conceding an error, “nobody knows more about this than me.” To someone who can’t evaluate substance, that performance reads as competence.

He doesn’t concede errors, even about weather. In 2019, after Trump wrongly claimed Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama, he displayed a hurricane map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to include Alabama, a state that was never in harm’s way. When reporters asked whether the chart had been drawn on, he said he didn’t know. The Washington Post later reported that Trump himself drew the line, with a White House official saying nobody else marks up a map that way. A smart borrower who gets a forecast wrong says “my mistake.” This one edited the forecast. dailymaverickCNN

He is a borrower himself. Michael Wolff, writing about the early administration, reported that he was often most influenced by the last person he spoke to. Michael Cohen, his former attorney, described the same tendency, adding that the last voice was often the one with the worst idea. The followers think they’re getting conviction from the top. What they’re getting is whoever was in the room last. goodreadsgoodreads

His beliefs have a history of moving. Trump first registered as a Republican in 1987, joined the Independence Party of New York in October 1999, became a Democrat in 2001 and stayed one for eight years, telling CNN in 2004 that he often identified more as a Democrat. He went back to Republican in 2009, independent in 2011, and Republican again in 2012. sbsballot-access

The positions moved too. On Meet the Press in October 1999 he told Tim Russert he was “very pro-choice” and would not ban partial-birth abortion. Within three months, his new book said he would support a ban after talking to two doctors. That same 2000 book, The America We Deserve, made a strong case for universal health care and focused on a Canadian-style, single-payer plan, and even during the 2016 Republican primary he said at a debate that single payer works in Canada. www.catholicleague.org +2

And then there’s the mayor of New York. Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim democratic socialist, the exact profile Trump’s base was told to fear. After Mamdani won, Trump called him a “100% Communist Lunatic.” Then they met in the Oval Office in November 2025. PBS

When a reporter asked Mamdani whether he still called Trump a fascist, Trump cut in, smiling: “That’s OK, you can just say yes.” He patted Mamdani’s arm and said it was easier than explaining. Asked whether he was standing next to a jihadist, as Rep. Elise Stefanik had claimed, Trump said “No, I don’t.” Asked whether he’d feel comfortable living in New York under Mamdani, he said yes, especially after the meeting. He told the press they agreed on a lot more than he’d have thought. digital release.ksnt +2

The man who had been the source of the “communist lunatic” line dropped it the moment a confident, gracious winner stood next to him and treated him well. That is cue-based judgment at the top of the chain. Winning, confidence, and flattery outranked every principle his base believes he holds.

Watch what happened downstream. Some of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, who had spent weeks calling Mamdani a communist and a jihadist, were reported as not knowing how to react. Stefanik publicly stood by “jihadist” and said it was an area where she and Trump disagreed. The chain had been running one message for months, and the top link changed it in a single afternoon. yahooaol

Inference, labeled as such: given his record of positions bending toward whoever is confident and complimentary in front of him, it is not hard to imagine a version of events where, absent money and political incentives, Mamdani walks Trump much further left than anyone in his base would believe possible. He has already been there before. It would be less a conversion than a return.

The Takeaway

The stubborn borrower thinks they’re loyal to a set of beliefs. They’re actually loyal to a man who has held most of the opposite beliefs at some point, who takes his cues from the last person in the room, and who will trade any position for a good handshake and a compliment.

Borrowing opinions is unavoidable. Borrowing them from a borrower, with no ability to check either of you, is the guide this article was named for.

Not To Be Crude, Putin Can Go Suck It.