Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers by John W. Dean

Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

by John W. Dean

View on Goodreads
Politics & Power

Why would evangelicals stay with Trump through sexual misconduct allegations, or working-class voters back policies that may hurt them? Dean and Altemeyer answer with authoritarianism, using Altemeyer's own Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale and Monmouth polling research to describe supporters who feel their world destabilizing and want a strong leader to protect them.

Core ideas
  • Double standards come easy: High scorers struggle to tell fact from falsehood, hold contradictory beliefs comfortably, and judge allies and opponents by different rules.
  • Cohn, then Nixon: Trump's tactics trace to Roy Cohn and to Nixon, and Dean judges him more ruthless and more ignorant of democratic norms than the president he served.
  • Bigger than one election: Whatever the 2020 result, a base that large means you should expect the polarization to last.
Published2020
Pages368
ISBN9781612199061
ReadNov 2025

Connected to 9 other books

See the connection map
The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink by Thom Hartmann The Last American President Thom Hartmann Read Jan 2026 Hartmann's argument is that Trump is a symptom of a system that was already decaying, not its cause. The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton The Room Where It Happened John Bolton Read Oct 2025 Bolton's case is that Trump ran foreign policy around his own interests and reelection rather than national security. The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy by Brian Klaas The Despot's Apprentice Brian Klaas Read Aug 2025 Eroding a democracy starts with eroding the truth, and Klaas finds despots' tactics all through Trump's first year: attacks on… White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Thomas F. Schaller White Rural Rage Thomas F. Schaller Read Sep 2024 Rural white Americans hold outsized electoral power and still face poor access to health care, failing infrastructure and lost… The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt Read Jun 2023 In Jonathan Haidt's picture, your moral judgments start as intuitions, and your reasoning mostly arrives afterward to justify… Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas Corruptible Brian Klaas Read May 2023 Does power corrupt, or do corruptible people go looking for it? How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky How Democracies Die Steven Levitsky Read Jan 2023 Modern democracies rarely end in a coup. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Twilight of Democracy Anne Applebaum Read Oct 2022 Why do educated, often prosperous people who once championed liberal democracy end up backing nationalists and would-be autocrats? The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality by Chris C. Mooney The Republican Brain Chris C. Mooney Read May 2022 Why do American conservatives more often reject mainstream findings on climate change, evolution, economics and history?