Bulwark Takes - The One Trait That Predicts Trump Support (w. Matthew MacWilliams)

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

Sam Stein is joined by Matthew MacWilliams to discuss his foreshadowing 2016 article in Politico Magazine linking support for Donald Trump to authoritarian tendencies. They discuss how fear activates authoritarian dispositions, the role of social media in amplifying Trump’s message, the dangers of America’s current drift toward authoritarianism, and if there’s anything that can be done to stop it. Read Matthew MacWilliams’ 2016 piece, “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter“

Hey, guys, this is me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork. And I am pleased to be joined by Matthew McWilliams, who is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. And you might be wondering, well, why are we having Matthew McWilliams on this podcast? Why are we? Who is this guy? Who is this guy? So this guy is an Oracle, a real life Oracle.

Not of Delphi. Yeah, exactly. In all seriousness, the reason we're talking with Matthew McWilliams today is because a couple weeks ago in our office Slack. We were debating Donald Trump and why voters have flocked to him in the way they have. And one of our fellow editors here, Hannah Yost, said, you know who we should talk to about this phenomenon? Is that guy who wrote that thing in Politico back in 2016 about how there's one trait that can predict whether you're a Trump supporter? And she pasted the URL, and it was to a Politico magazine story. And indeed, it was from January 17th,

16th during the campaign. And it's titled, the one weird trait that predicts whether you're a Trump supporter. And that trait is, Matthew, what is it? It's authoritarianism. Oh, my. And here we are. Here we are. And I can tell you when I wrote that thing?

Yeah, I used the word authoritarianism. It was like verboten. Now everyone uses it. But when I wrote it, it was like, no, you can't say that. Can't use that. Can't use that. All right. Before we get into the reaction to your piece from 2016.

Tell us what the study and findings are based on. Well, the findings are based on a series of poll questions. And there are four poll questions, now they're eight, but are used to determine if a person's an authoritarian or not. It's not deterministic. It's probabilistic, which means, you know, if you score high in the authoritarian scale doesn't mean you're authoritarian, but you might be.

You're more likely to be than not. inclined to be. Yes, you're inclined to be. And what that means is that your political attitudes and your political opinions will reflect an authoritarian outlook much more than they are not likely to. I suppose you should define what an authoritarian outlook is. An authoritarian outlook is pretty simple. It is for someone who wants authority, order, doesn't like diversity at all. And, And we'll sacrifice liberty, quite frankly, for security. And it is a disposition that gets turned on by fear. It's always out there.

There was always a certain percentage of the people who have this disposition. But it gets turned on by fear. Right. Now, the time that this was being studied, there was a lot of interest in figuring out why people were flocking to Trump. And there was a lot of theories around it was, oh, are they, you know, poorly educated? Are they poor? Are they white? Is it's race-based? Is this about, you know, trade? Is this about, you know, the hollowing out of the manufacturing class? And maybe those contributed to it. But why did you jump to the conclusion from this data that, in fact, it was proclivity towards authoritarianism that was, in fact, what was drawing people to Trump? Well, you know, I was one of the oldest Ph.D students in this cosmos, at least.

Are you aware of other cosmos? There might be another multiverse where there's someone that's older. But I was like the Chevy Chase, you know, of the community. And I had come across this book by Mark Ketherington and Jonathan Weiler, authoritarianism and polarization in American politics. And I was fascinated by it. Really fascinating book. But it was a book that was basically discounted by political science because who would study authoritarianism,

authoritarianism is dead. And that led me to really study authoritarianism. There are thousands of articles written on authoritarianism coming out of World War II, lots of studies done. And I became more and more fascinated by it and wrote my PhD. Sorry to even mention that on authoritarianism. And as I was finishing at my PhD, I was listening to Trump. You know, he'd come down the golden escalator.

And from his first speech, it was written from an authoritarian perspective. It was written to activate authoritarians. Our country needs a truly great leader. And we need a truly great leader now. We need somebody that literally will take this country and make it great again. Now, I don't know if he knew that, but that's what it was written for. that entire speech, the fear-mongering, the divisiveness, the separating to us versus them, the basic othering.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. I assume are good people.

I said, well, that's kind of interesting. And then I watched him go through the fall and said, he is really pushing authoritarian buttons. Is he getting a broad enough reach? And he was because of social media, getting a broad enough reach to reach his audience. And so I came up and said, the question is, is he activating authoritarian?

From Hetherington's book, we know, or we knew, that authoritarian said sorted from all three parties, you know, Republican-dependent, independents, Democrats, into Republican Party. Was he reaching them? Was he activating them? So I put a poll in the field to find out. Can we stop for a second there?

Because you said that they had been sort of sorting into the Republican Party, and I want to just maybe play with that a little bit. Because a lot of the people who came to support Trump, or at least a fair number, I should say, were previously Democrats. And I think a lot of people have difficult sort of conceiving the idea that people who identified a Democrats also have a proclivity

or an inclination to support authoritarian tendencies, when in fact that is true. And Trump did activate that. Yes, he did. My first study on this, the polling, I looked at the primary audience. So I was focusing on Republican primary voters. But you're absolutely right. And before the culture wars started, early 60s, it appears that authoritarian's were pretty well sorted across parties. They started moving towards the Republican Party. This is Hetherington's book over time. They haven't all sorted into the Republican Party at all. But what I looked at, because this was the primary, I was doing this in the, this November and December of 2015, I put the poll in the field. I was interested in the Republican Party itself and authoritarians in the Republican Party.

and was Trump galvanizing that base? Because if he could activate and galvanize that base, it was a big enough base that he could carry and win the primary. So that's what I focused on. Now, how much of this is all subconscious versus overt pining for authoritarianism? No one's going to say outward, well, not no one, but few people will say hourly, yes, I really want an authoritarian. Although, I will say, actually now it is sort of in vogue for some people to say, yes, we need a strong man.

But at the time, it really wasn't. So how much of this has surprised you that people are gravitating to this? Or was this always some sort of subconscious yearning that people had? It's always there. And actually, if you look at polling, some basic questions, not authoritarian questions, but attitudinal questions. What are some of those questions? Oh, I agree. disagree. We need a strong leader who pays no attention to Congress or the courts to make decisions

for us. That's one of the key ones. That's on the World Values Survey. It's done around the country. It's a way to measure. That's a pretty big red flag right there. Yeah. And when I did this, nationally it was like 34%. It's probably up to 38, 39 percent now, strong leader. So there are questions like that that are always answered in that way. The press is the enemy of us. That number has grown because it gets stoked, right? Authoritarians get activated, but it's always out there. The authoritarianism is always out there. The question is if it's activated or not. So it's always out there, and there have been historical context in America where it has been attempted to be activated, but it hasn't been successfully activated, at least not at this level.

So what was it about this moment, this person that made it successful, whereas others in the past maybe weren't? Yeah, I think that's a really good question. It's all about scale of communications, I believe. So you think this is a perfect combination of authoritarianism impulses and social media platforms and a charismatic figure? Yeah, or I don't know, charismatic is one way to describe it. I think it's an authoritarian who just knows how to push buttons, knows how to push the right buttons. You go back to 1990, 19, 1920, A. Palmer Mitchell, the Attorney General, he was the authoritarian. You know, we had the Palmer raids back then under Wilson.

He wanted to be president. He was doing all the things, his othering were communist, right? He was doing all those things, but it wasn't reaching scale. or you had McCarthy, another perfect example. He reached some scale, but there were institutions that said, no. There was an important hearing where he said, you know, have you no. Have you no shame, yeah. Have you no shame?

And obviously, no one has shame anymore. So there are those limiting factors that with Trump and using social media, he was able to reach that audience, and that social media platform was really supported by the 7 o'clock, you know, Fox, all the cable news channels, because they would cover Trump when he would come out. This is 2015, early 2016, and he would go out. He would say, you know, go to my social media account, give them the thing, and he brought them into his echo chamber. So there was siren call. It reached scale. It was on target. It activated the authoritarian base. I should have done my homework, but I didn't.

That's okay. I thought fail you. Thank you. Thank you. Gentlemen, see. Thank you. Have we, from a statistical standpoint, a polling standpoint, have we seen an uptick in people since Trump became president the first time to now, an uptick in people who identify or. or have exhibited characteristics that would suggest they are favorable towards authoritarianism? No, I mean, it's a fairly stable construct. It changes over time, but that time is not political time. It's more generational time. But what we've seen, however, there's another thing, I don't know if we want to get into this,

underneath this, sort of the, it's not really underneath, it's the mirror image of this. And it's a thing called demographic succession. Let's get into it. Yeah, what that is is, I'm an old guy, right? You've mentioned that. I'm more than 60 plus. And in America, people who are more than 70 plus, Septuagenarians, the greatest generation others,

65% of them are consistent supporters of democracy when measured five different polling questions. By comparison, 18 to 39-year-olds, only 24% of them are consistent supporters of democracy. So, as people like me age out and go into that other multi-universe, the younger people replace us, and these younger people have much lower scores, democracy scores, which means that the environment for an authoritarian leader or dictator or anyone, oligarch, who wants to get power, it becomes more and more likely that they will or can.

And it's something, you know, you go back to Madison, Federalist 63. He talked about the infection of the violent passions and how self-interested men would try to take over the Republican, destroy it or bend it to their wishes, basically. That's Federalist 63. And there are times when that has almost occurred in this country, it's because, me more and more likely that it can, unfortunately. That's really uplifting. Yeah.

I usually people end up crying after they listen to me. Sorry to your audience. I want to grapple with what my colleague JVL often writes about. And it's hard for people to sort of stomach it, but I think it's worthwhile to confront, which is maybe the reason that Trump has maintained his popularity level, even amidst all this, is because people want this. This is actually what people want. And the voters are getting what they want.

And as hard as that is for people who prefer the liberal democracy order to understand, as you know, even younger generations to a larger degree, are inclined to support this type of governance. Is that something that people need to grapple with that, in fact, we're getting what a good chunk of our population actually asked for? Absolutely. I mean, that is so spot on. And throughout American history, there's this tension between progressive moving things. forward and moving and looking backwards. You know, the paranoid style of politics, Hofstader talks about that, really goes back into that.

But Roger Smith and others have written about this. And there is that percentage of people out there who, for this, this is good when they're activated. But even worse, there's something else going on. They've got the demographic succession. But you also have this critical juncture. American history right now, which we're at. And that is, this has turned into a path-dependent process. And what I mean to that, they're increasing returns for capitulating and supporting Trump. And they're increasing punishments for not. And that's called a critical path,

path-dependent process. And that system has been set up now, which leads to a different historical path. We are on the democratic path. Now we're on the authoritarian path. And the question is, how far does it go? Well, the other question is, how do you get off of it? Right. Very, very, you know, in 2019, 2020, I was doing interviews and I had written the book. And the question was, can we stop the rot in democracy, the rot under the fabric of democracy, the rod in the supports, the foundation of democracy. Now is can we stop the spiral? dissent into authoritarianism. Because when path-dependent process kicks in and you get these increasing returns, so all these different sectors of society are capitulating. Why? Because it's in

their financial, economic, social power interest to do it. When that happens, everything starts to fold. So how do we beat those of us who care about democracy? I sure as hell do. How do we? How do we beat it. And you have to look at, you know, it's not all this, oh, this, oh, the Democratic Party, they have the wrong message. They have to use these magic bean words. They can't use these magic bean words. It's so much greater than that. It's so much larger. And you have to look at where the weaknesses are in the authoritarian opposition, which is beyond authoritarians right now. Now you have the fellow travelers who've joined on because it's good for them. They get rewards for doing it. Right.

And first, it's a minority of the population, which means that's why the next election's so important. If you rig that next election, okay, then we're going to stay on this path. There are many of the people in power are incompetent. They're destructive. They're destroying important parts of the system we all depend on. They're cruel, they're greedy. They're creating collateral damage. And if that collateral damage gets large enough and you can focus on it, you might be able to beat them in the election.

I mean, you should, you should have enough votes to beat them in the election. So if an election is held and it's fair and it's not totally rigged, you have a chance to defeat them as a ballot box. But it's like 2020, people kept asking me, okay, Biden wins, it's all over. I said, no, this is, we're in a path right now. now where it's several election cycles to turn this back. Right. It's not an elixir. 2020 was not an elixir.

But you're saying essentially that some of this is really dependent on them being incompetent and failing and people kind of naturally turning against them because you can't rely on institutions or even to a degree the opposition party itself. I mean, they have to focus the public extension, but you can't rely on them to do the heavy lifting. And that's a very, that's like a very disconcerning proposition that really what we're waiting for is for them to fuck up. Well, we have to have, we have to hope they fuck up. And I think they are fucking up. But then they're trying to cover up the fuck up. Cover up the fuck up. You know, firing the numbers, firing the people. So we can create our

own reality. Now, it's going back, but we also have to have an organized opposition to point the spotlight on it and to focus it. And the media plays an critical role on this, and they fail. I'm sorry. I watch some of these things, and it's like people talking about, well, mayors need to partner with the Trump. No, no. You have to call the National Guard being used in a police action as wrong. We don't need that. And you have to give an alternative. I think Pritzker did a pretty good job with the alternative, while you're cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from policing and doing this instead. I think Newsom making fun of Trump, that's a very pop culture, a very smart way of doing it. You like the New Sima Pritch. Well, I like it. I also think it has to be

focused on what really matters to people. And you mess with my social security. People in the villages are going to go, how do that happen? And then you've got to blame it if you're Trump on someone else, right? Right. The deep state, you know? Yeah, the deep state. But you are the deep state.

Yeah, it exists. You are the deep state. Yeah. But, you know, how does that play out, Sam? It plays out. Trump needs, if things start unraveling. I think the whole Bureau labor statistics and others, they're great fears on their side that some bad things are coming down the pike

that they have to explain away. There's only one way to get out of it if it really turns bad for him. And I think you probably know that as well as I do. You have to have a bigger problem. If you got a mess and you can't clean it up, you have to make the mess bigger. So how does he make the mess bigger? Well, there's the whole wag the dog phenomenon, right? Yeah. Oh, one of my favorite movies.

It's a good one. Well, this is depressing. I appreciate this. Sorry. I appreciate it, but it's depressing. Depressing with a smile. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for doing this. Matthew McWilliams of the German Marshall Fund.

He also wears a number of other hats, but we're not going to get into that. But I would encourage people to go back and read his 2016 piece for Politico and get his books. And Matthew, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. It's very nice. you and hello to all of your viewers. Thank you.