The Threat To Our Country Is Ignorant Wing-Nuts, Not Just Trump
Yesterday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat tweeted that a picture of the Capitol being burned down, that Señor Trumpanzee “re-truthed on his social media platform, is a graphic depiction of him telling us that he intends to continue the assault on the Capitol and that his war against our democracy will continue. I think the Mar-a-Lago Hitler-admirer has made his disrespect for the Constitution and for democracy abundantly clear time and again.
Yesterday, former GOP media celebrity, Charlie Sykes noted that Señor T keeps telling us what he intends to do. “In Florida the other day, the putative GOP nominee pledged to execute the ‘largest domestic deportation operation in American history’ on his first day in office. His remark, we are told, was ‘met with thunderous applause’ from the MAGA crowd. He’s making other promises as well. Earlier this week, the WaPo reported: ‘Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term.’ Yesterday, he confirmed it. In an interview on Univision, Trump was asked if he would indeed weaponize the FBI and Justice Department against his opponents. Perhaps attention should be paid to his answer: ‘Yeah. If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse. What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box… If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, Go down and indict them. They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.’”
This should all be disqualifying but “a lot of Americans,” wrote Philip Bump, “embrace Trump’s authoritarianism.” It’s a combination needed for a fascist takeover— a fascist leader and pro-fascist followers. That describes today’s Republican Party. Lots of swing voters and vaguely mainstream Republicans voters in Ohio, Virginia and even Kentucky sensed that last Tuesday, which is why the GOP did so badly in places where Republicans usually win.
Bump contrasted Trump’s grasp on the GOP with a growing “awareness of Trump’s plans… that are often unvarnished embraces of an authoritarian use of power. Trump plans to root out disloyal bureaucrats and install ideologically sympathetic ones. He’s speaking openly of using the Justice Department to target his opponents, including to hobble possible political opponents… Given Trump’s increasingly explicit rhetoric about shifting the chief executive position toward authoritarianism, it seems difficult to understand how he’s still running even with President Biden in early polling— or, in some cases, leading him.
For many Americans, a turn toward authoritarianism isn’t seen as a negative. Many Americans support that idea.
Last month, PRRI released the results of its annual American Values Survey. The pollsters asked respondents a slew of questions measuring their views of the country and its politics in the moment. Included among the questions was one that specifically addressed the question of authoritarianism: Did they think that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction?
About 2 in 5 respondents said they did. That included nearly half of Republicans.
Back in early 2016, political scientist and consultant Matthew MacWilliams identified support for authoritarian tendencies as a key indicator of support for Trump among Republican primary voters. Before the 2020 election, he revisited the idea, noting that “approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism, according to their answers to four simple survey questions used by social scientists to estimate this disposition.”
Those questions addressed several different components of authoritarian sympathy, MacWilliams explained. One asked a question similar to PRRI’s, about willingness to let a “strong leader” do what he or she wants. Another centered on perceptions of the media. A third focused on opposition to diversity.
The American National Election Studies survey conducted around presidential elections included questions that approximated the ones asked by MacWilliams.
Less than half of respondents objected to the idea that we need a strong leader, even if the leader bends existing rules. A plurality of conservatives endorsed that idea.
Less than half of respondents similarly expressed concern that the government might want to muffle critical reporting with a plurality of conservatives again expressing a lack of concern about that possibility.
Most respondents did say they thought diversity made America a better place. A plurality of conservatives, though, said they thought it made no difference. They were five times as likely as liberals to say it made the country worse.
These are measurements of authoritarian sympathies in the abstract, which indicate that a lot of Americans shrug at the idea of a strong leader acting outside legal boundaries. But, again, we can see that explicitly in 2024 polling.
CNN’s most recent polling, conducted by SSRS, shows that Trump leads Biden nationally by a 4-point margin, statistically even. Even given Trump’s response to the 2020 election, though, and the myriad criminal charges he faces, respondents were five points more likely to say they would be proud to have him as president then said the same of Biden.
CNN’s poll also asked people to measure Biden and Trump on personal characteristics. Most respondents said that they thought Biden had respect for the rule of law; only about a third said the same of Trump.
But remember: 49 percent of respondents prefer Trump over Biden. Meaning that at least 14 percent of respondents both think that Trump doesn’t respect the rule of law and want him to be president.
…Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, the press has been criticized for failing to accurately convey what he wants to do with presidential power. Again, this has at times been fair criticism. But the reason Trump is doing well in the polls at the moment is not simply that people are unfamiliar with his stated authoritarian intentions should he be inaugurated in January 2025.
It’s also that a lot of people support those intentions.
