12% of Americans believe in the overthrow of the American government to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.

 

In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new

poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the

stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an

illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest

that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is

justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”


Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive

language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be

getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.


Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of

respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden

was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That

corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.”

(An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even

larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen

from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save

our country.”

Gellman, Barton, January 6 Was Practice, The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2022, p. 31

Is this finding that 12% of Americans want to overthrow the U.S. government to restore Donald Trump to the presidency a concern to the other 88%? If it is what can, should, be done about it? Is the cult of Trump and the GOP going to bring down our democracy? It already is if you look at the states that have enacted voting suppression laws and campaigned for insurrectionists to occupy state wide offices that over see elections.

As Tip O'Neil said when he was speaker of the house in the late 70s and most of the 80s, "All politics are local." Pay attention to who is running for your local offices from school board on up.