Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

by John W. Dean

His supporters thought he was a very successful entrepreneur whose business acumen made him worth, he claimed, about eight billion dollars. He was not.

But he has continued to make outlandish claims, and by his third year in office he declared himself the greatest president ever. Even that was not enough; he decided in August 2019 to declare that historically this period would be known as “the Age of Trump.”2

You can wonder if Trump, like Caesar Augustus, wants to become a god. But suppose he did become one. He would want to become the number one god. We fear however that in the meanwhile he will try next for becoming president for life.

Donald Trump gave up trying to be convincing long ago. He just makes pronouncements and attacks those who ask for evidence.

liar must ask: Did this really happen or did I make it up? His memory is a tattered lace doily of things barely hanging together. Trump lives in “Trump World,” a mishmash of “alternate facts.”8 A place where “the truth isn’t truth.”9 During Special Counsel

Trump may believe he never said any of these things. He made them up on the spot to whack down an unpleasant fact that had come up.

He may be the least informed national leader in the world. Aides report he is only interested in the stock market, employment figures, and trade balances. He has often gone into meetings with heads of state and made a fool of himself because he had refused to learn

anything about the topics on the agenda.

Trump’s worldview is based on conspiracy theories and uneducated beliefs. People embrace conspiracy theories for many reasons, but strong critical-thinking skills is not among them.

Trump appears to believe just about every quack-a-doodle-do conspiracy theory that comes down the road.

Trump’s performance in school left him significantly less educated than he should have been,

Trump covers his far-flung ignorance by claiming widespread expertise.

knows astonishingly little. Consider the reason he gave for abandoning America’s Kurdish allies in Syria in 2019: “They didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy.”27 His ignorance of who the Kurds are, World War II, and the invasion of Normandy revealed by that statement is so astounding, it hurts your hair.

helplessly in the grip of one-man rule. That is why authoritarianism so often leads to a nation’s doom.

When you demand total loyalty from your staff, you take away your best chance to avoid blunders.

Trump dislikes getting advice and becomes angry when someone tries to explain something to him,

Trump was asking these elected officials straight out to betray their oath of office, to give their highest loyalty to him, rather than the Constitution and those who had elected them.

If incessant lying, becoming scatterbrained, increasingly relying on the Hail Marys of intuition, and demanding unquestioning loyalty betray a mind fighting against its own grand inquisitor, frequent unjustified aggression may also flag that a person’s mental life is collapsing under stress. Vicious combativeness is another hallmark of an authoritarian leader.

there has been an increasing nastiness of Trump’s attacks.

Saying John McCain was not a hero, when as far as we know Trump has never done a single heroic thing in his life, shrunk him to the size of a flea.

Donald Trump does, in our view, have two exceptional skills not uncommon in authoritarian leaders: He is world-class at intimidating people and just as skilled at conning others. That is why we think he would score highly on the Power-Mad and Conman Scales we used to introduce the previous chapters.

Trump is a master at diverting attention, by changing the subject when he is in trouble.

notwithstanding his oath to uphold the Constitution, he does not believe it applies to him.

lawsuit charging him with conspicuous violations of the Constitution are simply ignored, as they have proceeded through the federal courts.

Trump flatly asserted he had the power to override the Constitution, and he refused to answer any further questions on the subject.

The executive order was never issued, and Trump may just have been trying to stir up his base for the midterm election. But if he was testing the waters to see what would happen if he tried to overthrow the Constitution, say, to save his own skin, he would have noticed that nary a peep came from either his base or the Republicans in Congress.

He believes that strong leaders tolerate no dissent, and they do not want to be bothered with any information contrary to their view of the world, for they are infallible.

he understands he is deeply flawed he demands unquestioning loyalty from all, and total silence about what he is really like. Finally, as president he has become increasingly aggressive in attacking any who disagree with him.

The very troubling vulnerability of our democracy to dictatorship lies with the startling number of Americans who made Trump president, despite his flaws and conspicuous lack of fitness for the job.

the real threat lay in a large part of the population that was coiled like a tightly wound spring with enough pent-up energy to drive a dictator through all barriers into the White House.

Trump has had a rock-solid 41 to 45 percent approval by likely voters.

No previous president in the history of public opinion polling has enjoyed such consistently solid backing.6 Trump is disliked by most Americans, but his base has kept the faith to a degree that seems to defy human understanding.

Trump loses in 2020 you can be certain that he, who has “fixed” more outcomes than the World Wrestling Federation and whose campaign for the presidency involved deception and lying from the start, will tell his followers the election was rigged, and they will believe him.

if Trump accepts the will of the majority and the Electoral College and leaves the White House, his

backers will remain a very powerful force, ready to give undying loyalty to him for as long as he wants, and then to the next dictator-in-waiting. And the next one will almost certainly be smarter than Donald Trump. You can be sure some...

Many people voted for him even though they disliked him enormously. But they disliked Hillary Clinton enormously squared.

Social Dominators. People who believe in inequality between groups. Predictably, they usually believe their groups should be more prestigious and powerful than others.

Authoritarian Followers. These people are submissive, fearful, and longing for a mighty leader who will protect them from life’s threats.

Their ethnocentrism (partiality to one’s own group) is often based on their religious training and they have been found to be highly self-righteous.

“Double Highs.” Some people score highly in both being a Social Dominator and being an Authoritarian Follower,

“Some groups of people must be kept in their place,” and “It’s probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom.”

characterize social dominators in general. (This list was assembled by author Dean in 2005, long before he had any knowledge of Donald Trump.) The traits are:

men (typically) faintly hedonistic oppose equality pitiless dominating intimidating and bullying amoral vengeful desire personal power exploitive manipulative dishonest cheat to win highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic) mean-spirited militant nationalistic tells others what they want to hear takes advantage of suckers specializes in creating false images to sell self will pretend to be religious if they are not genuinely so usually politically and economically conservative

SDOs not only oppose equality, but they also oppose giving people equal opportunity.

White social dominators prejudge and dislike almost every minority or disadvantaged group you can think of: Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese, homosexuals, Muslims, North American Indians, and women—to name ten.

Social dominators, with their preference for keeping-things-as-they-are, might have generally preferred the Republican Party before 2008. But they probably began rushing pell-mell to the GOP banner when Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008. Trump’s candidacy in 2016 just produced the final wave of a decades-long migration of social dominators and other authoritarians into the GOP camp as the party leaders who invited them in held the gates wide open.

his slogan to make America great again would particularly appeal to social dominators for whom racial superiority meant a great deal.

Trump understood that resentment seethed within many white Americans, especially among undereducated white men, over the increased immigration of non-whites to the United States and the perception that, in its efforts to give minorities a fairer chance at the American dream, the federal government was “against white people.”

Even the crowd was fake. Unable to find many people who would support his running for president, Trump had hired Extra-Mile Casting to provide actors to wear the Trump T-shirts and fill the atrium (which looked much bigger

TV than it really is) and celebrate the glorious news that The Donald was going to come down from on high and save the nation.24 The pay was $50, and the campaign provided handmade signs that said things like, “People for a Stronger America.” (They should have read, “Hire out-of-work actors trying to pay the rent.”).