Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Melissa Deckman: Thanks for having me, Greg. I appreciate you talking about our survey today.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in four years? And I would also add that it’s not a surprise because as Reuters recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly. And he did the right thing and he’s a good guy.
Deckman: No, not at all. Wearing my political scientist hat, it made me think about when I used to teach a course on the presidency for many years where we talked about the imperial presidency. And this was, of course, this era during the late 1960s, early ’70s, largely in response to the Vietnam War, where many people thought the president was taking too much power unilaterally without the control of Congress. Those days, however, look quite quaint compared to, I think, what we’re seeing now. I would argue, in some ways, we are seeing an imperial presidency because we have a president who is willing to use the full throttle of the administrative state, the office to really get private businesses, universities, law firms to really bend to his will. And I think it is a violation of the idea of checks and balances, the role of government in our society. It’s pretty remarkable.
Deckman: Yeah. And just thinking about it from an economic perspective—if you look at it through the lens of traditional conservative republicanism—I think about Milton Friedman. I’m not an economist, but this idea of a planned economy, having government dictate the terms of what is going to be sold at what price, is really pretty much blasphemy according to that school of thought. So it is a pretty remarkable change of events, the overreach that we’re seeing with this presidency even on sectors that heretofore have largely been touted [as ones where] the proper role and scope of government should be government getting out. The invisible hand should be invisible. It really shouldn’t be this blatant and obvious.
Deckman: Or they go against the interest of their voters, right? If you think about the growth of Trump’s support among the working class—even among the working class of color to some extent, at least from 2024—these policies are really bad for the base, economically speaking.
Deckman: Well, I think we were getting at trying to find a question that would break through and really demonstrate Americans’ thoughts on Trump’s overall behavior. There’s lots in terms of the specifics of his policies—and we can talk about that—but we wanted a question that really put in stark relief what we’re seeing here. Are we seeing someone who’s dictatorial, who is willing to use the powers of the government in many ways that usurp American democracy? Or are we seeing that Americans might be more supportive of more authoritarian tendencies within the administration? So this question cuts to the noise, and I think it’s pretty revealing. If you had told me even four years ago that a majority of Americans would describe a president as a dictator, I would have been surprised at that. Yet, this is where we are in this political moment.
Deckman: We found that independents are far more likely to agree with the first statement than the second. Fifty-six percent of independents basically say that Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy versus 42 percent who really viewed him more as a strong leader who needs those powers to restore America’s greatness.
Deckman: Yeah, I think that’s really fair. And maybe we return again to immigration. I’m thinking back to when Trump was first president, in his first term. Most Americans, regardless of ideology, regardless of partisanship, would agree that for all intents and purposes, our border has been broken. We don’t have a policy that works. I think liberals would say that. I think conservatives would say that. But I think what you saw in Donald Trump—who, of course, has always been motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment, the Great Replacement Theory, all these sorts of things; Trump likes to extol those ideas all the time when he was on the campaign trail—[was] the overreach of family separation, for example. And I think historically when Trump overreaches in terms of these policies—and we asked the question about “Should immigrants who are in the country illegally be in internment camps guarded by the military before they’re deported?” which is actually happening in Guantanamo Bay—we found all these things [to be] very unpopular with most Americans, save the Republican base and white evangelical Protestants. We find by and large that independents are not supportive of that. So when there’s been an overreach in terms of policy, when it comes to immigration in particular, it really drives public opinion in the opposite direction.
Deckman: What I take away from these findings looking at the idea of the basic constitutional design, the separation of powers, checks and balances, all of those sorts of things [is that] Americans have strong regard for those principles, especially checks and balances. Even among Republicans, we don’t find support for the idea that Trump should or any president, rather, should disregard what is actually happening with the courts.
Sargent: You guys also find in the poll that seven in 10 adherents of Christian nationalism see Trump positively as a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness, whereas only a small minority of them see Trump as a dictator figure. Meanwhile, you’ve got that 44 percent, as we discussed at the beginning, who don’t see Trump as a dictator. In a way, with those numbers, you’re delineating the voters who are potentially genuinely authoritarian or have real authoritarian sympathies, right? Can you talk about that pool of voters? Who are they?
And if you believe that God has ordained you to be here, and if you believe that God ordains a certain design of how government should be run, the order of how society should be set up hierarchically, all those sorts of things, then the Constitution and due process and the norms of a democracy are far less important. So those individuals are among the strongest supporters of Donald Trump. We find that pretty consistently. And of course, I think it’s not a coincidence that a lot of Trump’s agenda—not all of it certainly, but a lot of it—is driven by Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, which is a longstanding conservative organization. From pronatalist policies to banning reproductive rights to getting rid of the rights of transgender Americans to getting rid of DEI initiatives—all of these are of accord that harken back to some Christian nationalist viewpoints. So I’m not surprised at all. Throughout the report, you’ll see the strongest supporters for Trump, for his policies, and administration really come from Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalist views.
Deckman: Yeah. We found pretty consistently that about four in 10 Americans we would describe as having more support for authoritarian tendencies. So in addition, of course, to Christian nationalist adherents and even sympathizers, these are folks who generally support the ideas of Christian nationalism maybe not to the same extent as who we classify as adherents. That’s about 30 percent of the U.S. population. But clearly it’s the base of the party, strong Republicans. I think Republicans have been far more likely to endorse these views; we see that showing up over and over in our poll. If you go back to last fall’s survey of authoritarianism, it’s many Republicans as well. I think a consistent finding is that a good 35 to 40 percent of the country are really behind Donald Trump—this kind of MAGA base. These are the folks who are watching Fox News or more conservative news outlets. They’re getting their news and information from podcasts that lean in that direction. And they’re certainly getting their ideas about policy shaped very dramatically by this right-wing echo chamber in lots of ways. All those things, I think, have endeared Trump and his approach to a lot of these folks.
Sargent: So to bring this back to Bezos and Trump, I think what’s emerging here—the big story—is that there’s this small authoritarian core in the country, but there’s this large body of voters in the middle that includes independents. Maybe a fair amount of whom voted for Trump, who originally went into this—meaning voted for Trump—with the thought that, as you said, this is a guy who will break the furniture, he’ll knock heads together, he’ll make things work, but they’re not there when it comes to the actual authoritarianism. And when they start to see that, they get alienated.
Deckman: I think you have really a newly emboldened Donald Trump who has learned some lessons from his first term in office. He, of course, has surrounded himself by administrators who are willing to really not even just push the needle but to go all the way over into acts that, I think, frankly are quite unconstitutional. It’s not necessarily something though that we see in our survey today that most Americans endorse. To be fair, I think that most Americans voted for Donald Trump, and we did see him make gains with Hispanic voters, with some African American voters—[though] not as many as I think initially thought—with younger voters, Gen Z men in particular. I think what was really driving that was really frustration, not just with the political system but with the economy. You had for the first time in decades sustained inflation that was largely a product of Covid, and looking at supply chains and the vestiges of that. But nonetheless, this was really new for a large share of American voters.
Sargent: It sure sounds as if the findings of this poll are that the middle of the country is alienated by this stuff pretty strongly.
Sargent: I totally agree. I think what we’re going to see develop here is ports are going to stop getting products in, shelves are going to be empty, government’s going to be breaking down in its core services, and Trump’s authoritarianism is just going to be sitting out there on the table without any actual effective governance behind it, and it’s going to get a whole lot worse for the president. Melissa Deckman, thank you so much for coming on with us today. Great discussion.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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