While Donald Trump’s allies keep trying to convince the public that his public support is “soaring” and “skyrocketing,” the president himself claims his approval rating is “in the high 70s,” reality keeps getting in the way. In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump’s backing down to just 42% — an unusually low number for an incumbent president just three months into his term.
But while the topline results were of interest, it was some of the issue-specific data that stood out for me. From the same national survey (click the link for details about methodology and the margin of error):
- 23% of Republican voters said the president should defy court orders he disagrees with.
- 28% of Republican voters said the president should withhold funding from universities he disagrees with.
- 26% of Republican voters said the president should control national museums and theaters.
Some might see this and feel a sense of relief, since the views are not a majority. But the flip side is true, too: The Reuters/Ipsos data suggests roughly a fourth of rank-and-file GOP voters are on board with a radical vision in which a president has authoritarian-style authority over the rule of law and civic institutions.
This comes on the heels of a recent CBS News/YouGov poll that found 44% of Republican voters said federal judges should not be allowed to review Trump’s policies.
A month earlier, The Washington Post highlighted a YouGov poll that indicated nearly half of GOP voters said that a strongman government without a Congress was at least a “fairly” good system of government. Among those who identified themselves as primarily supporters of Trump, that number climbed to 55%.
The month before that, a Pew Research Center survey found that 59% 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.”
There were similar results during the 2024 campaign. The Associated Press reported about a year ago, 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. The more Trump sees evidence that his party’s base approves of authoritarian tactics as legitimate, the more likely it is that the incumbent president will continue to flout the nation’s constitutional system. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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