Our latent indoctrination into Puritan doomsday ideology is a pilot light that flares into extremism. Polling in 2023 of GOP caucus goers determined that Trump’s most autocratic statements make some voters more likely to support him, including 19 percent in response to his claim that he’d have “no choice” but to jail his opponents if reelected. (And 43 percent said that statement didn’t matter to them one way or the other.) Also, 55 percent increased their support in response to his interest in rooting out the “radical left thugs that live like vermin.”34
