Supporting the death penalty is an element of an authoritarian personality. So we can know without asking the Trumpers are all for it.
In the years after World War II some sociology researchers worked work to identify an authoritarian personality using the kind of test where structured questions are asked like would you rather go to a party or stay home and read a book. While saying there are no right or wrong answers but if you answer enough of them in the right way you can be identified as introvert, extrovert and whatever other personality categories they have in mind.
Mostly they were seeking an Answer to the question why did so many Germans put up with or help the Nazis.
Here is a quote about their work “A central idea of The Authoritarian Personality is that authoritarianism is the result of a Freudian developmental model. Excessively harsh and punitive parenting was posited to cause children to feel immense anger towards their parents; yet fear of parental disapproval or punishment caused people to not directly confront their parents, but rather to identify with and idolize authority figures”
Enough To make the person think sociology isn’t a real science. But I think they were on the something, the problem is personality types, if you buy into that thought, are not pure.
Completely obvious to me Trump is an authoritarian in a big way, and he sucked up to authoritarian national leaders around the world or wherever he could find them.
Some new quotes I consider profound:
“Trump appeals to people’s smallness, their fears, whatever part of them wants to look backward. We need to be careful that our necessary rebukes of the President don’t corner people into the kind of defensiveness that makes them even more vulnerable to those kinds of appeals. What we really need to do in some ways is talk past Trump and his sins.”
“What is often mistaken for breadth of political disagreement is actually narrow — if extremely intense — disagreement on a limited number of partisan issues.”
“There is often a remarkably resilient consensus in the country. Outside the white Deep South, there was a broad consensus against segregation in 1964; outside the most paranoid registers of Wall Street, there was a similar consensus for social guarantees in 1934. Right now, post-pandemic, polls show a robust consensus for a public option to the Affordable Care Act, modernized infrastructure, even for tax hikes on the very rich and big corporations. “
Jim Holland