Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations face one major obstacle: He is not very popular. As counterintuitive as it may seem, political science shows that would-be dictators need strong public support, especially early in the regimes. Successful autocrats convince broad swaths of the public that the nation is in a crisis so great that democracy must be sacrificed to save them. Trump has tried to create this illusion by spinning dramatic lies about American cities being “war-ravaged,” a hoax he’s tried to bolster by sending National Guard troops to cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to Portland. Most alarmingly, he’s been terrorizing immigrants with something akin to zeal, painting food cart operators and day care workers as an existential threat to middle America.

None of it has

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