The Age of Pretending Is Over: MAGA Is Authoritarian
To be a citizen means to be a guardian of the public square, not a client of the state or a subject of the leader.
In an age when democracy itself teeters on an unsteady axis, the unrelenting loyalty of Donald Trump's supporters has mystified and unnerved many. Despite blatant norm violations, undermining election integrity, pressuring officials, and even inciting a violent insurrection, Trump's base has remained steadfast. Empirical research from 2020 to 2025 reveals that this loyalty is neither accidental nor superficial. It is the product of deep psychological mechanisms: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), collective narcissism, motivated reasoning, and a dangerous comfort with oppression.
Consider the numbers. Trump increased his vote count in 2020 compared to 2016, even after four years of division and scandal (Hart & Stekler, 2021). When polled, individuals high in national collective narcissism, the inflated yet brittle belief in national greatness, were significantly more likely to say Trump should "stay in office" despite losing the election, even if it meant "bending democracy" (Keenan & Golec de Zavala, 2022). Here, loyalty morphs into complicity, and complicity into a form of political fanaticism, where no fact or principle can outweigh tribal allegiance.
It is tempting—for the sake of appearing "fair", to claim this partisan blindness afflicts both sides. Indeed, a 2024 longitudinal study in Public Opinion Quarterly found that Democrats also showed a slight increase in tolerance for norm erosion under Biden. But to equate mild procedural grumbling with the MAGA movement's wholesale rejection of democratic outcomes is to equate a paper cut with a severed artery. It is a false equivalence that only obfuscates reality: in this era, authoritarianism in America has a decidedly rightward tilt (Santos & Jost, 2024).
The psychological currents are unmistakable. Trump’s strongest backers consistently rank high in RWA, a personality trait marked by submission to strong leaders, aggression toward "outsiders," and a craving for rigid social order. According to Duckitt's dual-process model, RWA is rooted in a worldview that sees the world as fundamentally dangerous, necessitating harsh discipline and strong authority to survive. Research published in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (Wolf et al., 2024) confirms that authoritarianism is a decisive predictor of MAGA support, particularly among white men and women. Trump's apocalyptic rhetoric, rife with dangers at every corner, be they migrants, liberals, or imagined "deep state" actors, activates these authoritarian predispositions, making even democratic subversion seem not just tolerable but necessary.
Closely aligned with RWA is SDO, the belief that hierarchy and inequality are not merely inevitable but desirable. Trump’s ethno-nationalist appeals, "Make America Great Again,” resonated deeply with individuals scoring high on SDO. For some, dominance is not a bug in the system, but a feature worth preserving at all costs (Wolf et al., 2024). Those with a "competitive jungle" worldview, who see life as a ruthless zero-sum battle for resources and status, embrace leaders who promise to crush the competition.
Fueling these tendencies is collective narcissism, the group-level delusion that one’s nation (or race, or religion) is exceptional yet perpetually under siege. Golec de Zavala's work shows that national collective narcissism leads to hypersensitivity to slights, conspiracy beliefs, and ultimately, support for authoritarian measures when group dominance feels threatened (Keenan & Golec de Zavala, 2022). Trump’s followers see themselves not as aggressors but as a besieged tribe defending a sacred homeland, and to hell with democracy if it stands in the way.
The cognitive glue binding these forces is motivated reasoning: the tendency to twist facts to fit one's emotional needs. Trump's 2020 defeat did not spark soul-searching among his base; it sparked conspiracy theories, fantasies of fraud, and calls for extralegal "solutions" (Costello et al., 2023). Motivated reasoning, as Kahan's research on identity-protective cognition confirms, intensifies when core identities feel threatened. It does not merely distort reality, it annihilates it, replacing it with comforting fictions.
More alarming still is the willingness among Trump loyalists to accept oppression as legitimate, if it serves "the right side." System justification theory (Jost et al., 2024) explains why even marginalized individuals sometimes support regimes and policies that hurt them: preserving a comforting myth of social order outweighs personal suffering. Hence, white women endorsing a man and a movement steeped in misogyny (Wolf et al., 2024), or working-class Americans cheering tax cuts that leave them poorer.
Globally, these psychological patterns are not unique to America. Across Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, and the Philippines, authoritarian-populist leaders have ridden similar waves of RWA, SDO, collective narcissism, and conspiracy-driven grievance politics (Osborne et al., 2023). Fear, of immigrants, economic collapse, cultural "replacement,” heightens authoritarian instincts, which charismatic strongmen eagerly exploit. Social Identity Theory offers a chilling corollary: when leaders define "the people" narrowly enough, loyalty becomes a weapon, not a virtue.
While research acknowledges left-wing authoritarianism in specific pockets, it consistently finds that the major threat to democratic institutions today is right-wing authoritarian populism (Osborne et al., 2023; Santos & Jost, 2024). The scale and intensity are simply unmatched. One side grumbles about bureaucracy; the other fantasizes about overthrowing elections.
When left-wing authoritarianism does emerge, it tends to arise under extreme and historically specific conditions, often as a response to severe oppression or existential threats. Figures like Fidel Castro, who began by fighting against brutal authoritarian regimes in the name of liberation, offer a sobering illustration. What starts as a revolution against injustice can, under the weight of paranoia, violence, and unchecked power, mutate into new forms of dictatorship. These trajectories, however, require an extraordinary confluence of factors, prolonged oppression, foreign interference, economic collapse, conditions far rarer and less spontaneous than the broad, populist waves of right-wing authoritarianism we witness today. To understand this asymmetry is to grasp why contemporary threats to democracy are not, as some would claim, symmetrical.
By contrast, right-wing authoritarianism emerges with startling ease. It does not require the heavy machinery of oppression or the trauma of revolution; it needs only a sense of perceived loss, a belief that "our" people, "our" traditions, "our" status are under siege. A mild economic downturn, demographic change, or cultural shift can ignite the latent authoritarian impulses in the right-wing psyche. As countless studies show, these grievances do not require actual harm, only the perception of slipping dominance. In this way, right-wing authoritarian populism spreads not like a fire painstakingly built, but like dry grass catching a spark.
Thus, the enduring support for Trump is not a political quirk but a profound warning. The psychological ingredients, fear, dominance, grievance, delusion, are potent and perennial. Left unchecked, they will not simply erode democracy; they will end it. As authoritarianism exploits every fear and grievance, democratic societies must wage not only political battles but psychological ones: rekindling commitment to truth, tolerance for diversity, and a belief that "we" includes everyone, not merely those who mirror our fears.
Democracy, as ever, will survive not through complacency, but through courage, and a clear-eyed reckoning with the forces arrayed against it.
References
Hart, J., & Stekler, N. (2021). Does personality “Trump” ideology? Narcissism predicts support for Trump via ideological tendencies. Journal of Social Psychology, 161(6), 818–831. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2021.1944035
Keenan, O., & Golec de Zavala, A. (2022). Collective narcissism and the weakening of American democracy. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 22(3), 703–732. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12274
Wolf, K., Kim, C., et al. (2024). Support for the MAGA Agenda: Race, Gender, and Authoritarianism. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2023.xxx
Vescio, T. K., & Schermerhorn, N. E. C. (2021). Hegemonic masculinity predicts 2016 and 2020 voting and candidate evaluations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(2), e2020589118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2020589118
Santos, D. de O., & Jost, J. T. (2024). Liberal–conservative asymmetries in anti-democratic tendencies are partly explained by psychological differences. Communications Psychology, 2, Article 61. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00096-3
Osborne, D., Costello, T. H., Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (2023). The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 220–232. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00161-4
You've mapped the psychological dynamics of MAGA authoritarianism with impressive precision, especially the fusion of grievance, dominance, and identity-protective cognition.
One layer I think is crucial, and that you're already pointing toward, is how authoritarian movements don't just win by appealing to primal instincts; they win by exhausting the will to resist.
What starts as fear or grievance often hardens into learned helplessness: a kind of engineered paralysis, where outrage and confusion flood critical faculties until resignation feels easier than vigilance.
And even before MAGA, the environment that allowed this to flourish was deliberately constructed: not just through propaganda, but through the slow manufacture of confusion and delayed recognition among moderates, convincing many that "it can't happen here," even as it already was.
Your work is vital in helping people recognize that the battle is not just political, but profoundly psychological.
Thank you for laying out the architecture so clearly.
We’ll need that clarity as this continues.
This is courage