In another sense, however, the fidelity of Trump’s base remains astounding. He has made so many unforced errors because of his lack of understanding … - Bob Altemeyer

The main reason, I submit, is that most of Trump’s backers are authoritarian followers—people who submit too much to the leaders they consider legitimate, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want. “Well yeah,” you might say. “But that’s like saying an apple is an apple because it’s an apple.” And it would be golden delicious example of a rhetorical tautology except social scientists have had a good, independent way of measuring this kind of authoritarianism since the 1970s. And it was clear from the first studies that political “conservatives”—from ordinary voters to elected officials—tended to score highly on this personality test (Chapter 6 of The Authoritarians, the book on this website). We can gain considerable insight into Donald Trump’s supporters from the research on authoritarianism.

Eleanor's questions caused some anxiety, since "you are taught that you have to go this way or you'll go to hell." Near the end of her confirmation classes she gave a speech "intended to really question a lot of the beliefs." However, "it was so subtle that I guess nobody really caught on to it and they were all saying it was such a great speech." This made Eleanor feel guilty, since she appeared to be supporting religion when she had meant to question it. She did have some discussions with her minister about her questions, but found the answers to be unsatisfying. Sessions with a devoted Christian friend were much more influential. The two friends would often debate Christian teachings, with Eleanor taking the questioning position, and her friend defending religious beliefs. Similar discussions occurred in a high school English class. Eleanor's purpose in these debates was to make religion work for her. "I was trying at that point to tie everything to a religious framework that would allow me to believe in Christianity." But she couldn't find the answers she was looking for, and became less religious. She also hunted for answers in the Bible, which she read every evening before she went to bed. Eleanor misses those readings even today, "because it gives you a focus and if you believe in it, you have all the answers you're looking for right there in the Bible." But they were answers she could not accept.

Sometimes, when I tell people that I study authoritarian personalities, they say things like, "Oh, you mean neo-Nazis and the Klan." When these people are psychologists at conventions or the president of my university, I say "Right," because I know they will probably instantly forget whatever I reply. But I am more forthcoming with others. Most people seem surprised when I say, "No, I study normal folks, not Nazis." Few people, unless they are familiar with the history of fascism, understand that people as ordinary as you and I, and our friends and neighbors, might bring down democracy if the going got tough enough. But we are the people who, driven by fear and cuddling in our own self-righteousness, could create the wave that would lift the monsters among us to power. And once the monsters acquire the powers of the state, their evil explodes. Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to thing that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things. One of the first things Americans learned about the militias, in an Associated Press story dated April 27, 1995, is that they were "ordinary people who feel pushed."