For democracy advocates, Donald Trump and much of his agenda is rather terrifying. Indeed, the president spent part of this past weekend promoting a specific phrase — “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” — described by The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie as “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.”
Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital, Americans see a Republican-led Congress that’s grown far more interested in glorifying Trump personally than conducting oversight or honoring the legislative branch’s proper role in a checks-and-balances system. Indeed, GOP lawmakers routinely shrug their shoulders with indifference in response to White House abuses and excesses.
It’s reached the point at which Steve Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that Americans should recognize the contemporary Republican Party as “an authoritarian political party. “
The question then becomes how much of the party’s base would mind. The latest national Pew Research Center survey included some striking findings:
In contrast, a 59% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say many of the country’s problems could be addressed more effectively if Trump didn’t need to worry so much about Congress or the courts. Republicans who say they ‘strongly’ identify with the GOP are particularly likely to say the nation’s problems could be more effectively addressed by giving Trump more power: 78% say this.
The partisan divisions were enormous: 90% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents concluded it would be “too risky” to give Trump more power without checks and balances, but according to the Pew data, a majority of GOP voters came to the opposite conclusion.
(The survey was conducted from Jan. 27 to Feb. 2, 2025. A total of 5,086 panelists responded out of 5,699 who were sampled, for a survey-level response rate of 89%. The cumulative response rate accounting for nonresponse to the recruitment surveys and attrition is 3%. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 5,086 respondents is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.)
Alas, there’s no reason to see the results as an outlier. The Associated Press reported last spring, for example, on a 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.”
An NPR/PBS/Marist poll, released around the same time, asked respondents whether they agreed that conditions in the U.S. had 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.
Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter has maintained a very low public profile since stepping down from the high court in 2009, but as longtime readers might recall, he delivered some memorable remarks in 2012 about his broader political fears.
“I think some of the aspects of current American government that people on both sides find frustrating are partly a function of the inability of people to understand how government can and should function,” Souter said. “It is a product of civic ignorance.”
After quoting Benjamin Franklin’s admonition about democracy struggling to survive “too much ignorance,” the retired justice added, “I don’t worry about our losing republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because I think there is going to be a coup by the military, as has happened in some of the places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough … some one person will come forward and say, ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ That is how the Roman republic fell.”
Souter concluded, “If we know who is responsible, I have enough faith in the American people to demand performance from those responsible. If we don’t know, we will stay away from the polls. We will not demand it. And the day will come when somebody will come forward, and we and the government will in effect say, ‘Take the ball and run with it. Do what you have to do.’ That is the way democracy dies. And if something is not done to improve the level of civic knowledge, that is what you should worry about at night.”
The results of the national Pew Research Center poll renewed the relevance of the retired justice’s warning.
