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Even before this year’s Republican presidential primaries and caucuses got underway, Donald Trump made little effort to hide his authoritarian impulses. The former president, for example, talked ambitions for a temporary dictatorship. He also suggested he should be allowed to commit crimes without consequences.
Trump also signaled an interest in seizing control of government departments and agencies that have historically operated with independence, enacting radical anti-immigrant plans, using government powers to crack down on journalists, and hiring right-wing lawyers who would be positioned to help Trump politicize federal law enforcement and exact revenge against his perceived political foes.
This authoritarian vision didn’t appear to have any meaningful effect on the former president’s support within his party, as evidenced by the fact that he easily won nearly every primary and caucus he competed in. Did Trump excel despite his desire for a radical power-grab or because of it?
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake summarized in his latest column:
Polling on the GOP’s appetite for a more powerful chief executive has been slow in coming. But it has been coming. And the emerging picture is that Republicans are remarkably on-board with a president who isn’t answerable to Congress and the courts — significantly more so than Democrats. And perhaps as significantly, very few Republicans seem to strongly object to the idea.
The Associated Press reported this week, for example, on the latest national AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey, which found that 57% of Republicans endorsed the idea of Trump “taking action on the country’s important policy issues without waiting for Congress or the courts.”
Alas, this doesn’t appear to be an outlier. Circling back to our coverage from several months ago, a national Fox News poll conducted in December asked respondents: “Some people say things in the U.S. are so far off track that we need a president willing to break some rules and laws to set things right, while others say the president should always follow the rules and laws. Which comes closest to your view?”
The survey found that 30% of self-identified Trump voters — nearly a third — were on board with a president who operates outside “rules and laws.”
The latest NPR/PBS/Marist poll, meanwhile, asked respondents whether they agreed that conditions in the United States have deteriorated to the point that “we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.” Among GOP voters, a 56% majority endorsed the idea.
The obvious problem, of course, is that too much of one of the nation’s political parties is moving away from democracy and the American system of government. But it also helps explain recent events in GOP nominating contests.
The more radical Trump became, the more his critics pointed to the former president’s authoritarian vision. It was against this backdrop that much of the Republican base effectively said in response, “Sounds good. Sign us up.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.