Donald Trump has argued four times in the last two weeks that many Americans are so desperate to lower crime rates, they’ll accept a president acting like a “dictator” to get the job done. At his marathon White House Cabinet meeting this week, the Republican explicitly declared, “Most people say, ‘If you call him a ‘dictator,’ if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.”
There’s no shortage of problems with suggesting the ends justify the means, especially as a president deploys armed troops onto American streets, but it’s also worth considering the question to Trump’s implicit question: Is he right about public attitudes? Is it true that “most” Americans are willing to embrace dictatorial tactics in exchange for public safety?
The answer to both questions is quickly coming into focus. Reuters reported:
Few Americans outside President Donald Trump’s Republican Party support his deployment of National Guard troops to police the streets of Washington, D.C., according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. The three-day poll, which concluded on Sunday, found that just 38% of Americans support using troops for law enforcement in the U.S. capital, with 46% opposed.
While most of the GOP’s rank-and-file supporters are apparently on board with the White House’s militarization of the nation’s capital — 76% of Republicans in the poll expressed support for the deployments — the same national survey found 28% of independents said they’re in favor of the policy, while among Democrats, support was just 8%.
This isn’t the only available data. The latest national Quinnipiac University poll also found that a 56% majority of Americans oppose the president’s decision to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. As was the case with the Reuters/Ipsos poll, the Quinnipiac survey found independent voters against the policy by a nearly two-to-one margin.
Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy noted, “Posting the National Guard in D.C. to fight local crime gets faint support, with independent voters giving the deployment a big thumbs down.” While the results aren’t altogether surprising, they are at odds with much of the recent conventional wisdom in political circles. Politico published a much-discussed piece this week, for example, that read in part, “To many Washington insiders, President Trump’s early August Beltway crime crackdown seemed like an opportunistic and hamhanded pivot after getting walloped for weeks over the Jeffrey Epstein affair. But if it wasn’t clear then, it is now: The White House’s public safety play is a deliberate ploy to refocus the narrative on an issue that favors Republicans ahead of the midterms — one that’s already backing Democrats into a corner.” Hours after that piece was published, Trump himself boasted at his Cabinet meeting that Democrats were falling into his “trap” by opposing tactics that enjoy broad support. The latest public opinion research suggests such assumptions are completely wrong about the American mainstream.
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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