During an interview on May 4, President Trump offered a startling response to a question from NBC’s Kristen Welker. She asked whether he believes he needs to uphold the Constitution in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. Garcia was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, and the Supreme Court has ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return.
Trump responded to Welker: “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know” from the person who, on Jan. 20, took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” is not acceptable. It hardly seems believable.
The interview came at the end of the president’s first 100 days in office. Expanded executive power, global chaos, a weakened dollar, and impending shortages in the stores add up to the worst first 100 days for any president in American history.
But the bitter taste of living under Trump has barely made a dent in the support and loyalty of his base. In his supporters’ eyes, Trump, like the pope, is infallible, an association he reinforced deliberately when he reposted on Truth Social an AI-generated of himself in papal attire.
While the president has disregarded constitutional values like freedom of speech and due process of law, his supporters contrast what they see as the president’s commitment to freedom with repressive, left-wing regimes; they resent it when they hear commentators call the president a dictator.
We have long known that people take in new information selectively and seek to avoid what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” the discomfort people experience when they hold beliefs, values or attitudes that are inconsistent with one another. To avoid that discomfort, people seek out information that aligns with their pre-existing beliefs, or they minimize the importance of dissonant messages.
The reaction of Trump’s supporters to his first 100 days shows the power of such processes.
While 42 percent of Americans give Trump an F for his first 100 days, only 5 percent of self-identified Republicans agree with that grade. Eighty-four percent of them give him either an A or a B. Things are almost exactly reversed among Democrats, with 5 percent giving the president an A or a B and 80 percent of them giving him an F.
Other polls reflect similar sentiments. A Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 5,000 American adults found that 52 percent of those respondents called Trump a “dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” Eighty-seven percent of Democrats agreed with that statement compared to only 17 percent of Republicans.
The survey shows that 19 percent of Republicans believe the president should be able to postpone the 2026 midterm elections if it is necessary to get the country out of a crisis. And 27 percent thought the Constitution should be amended to “allow presidents to serve more than two terms in office.”
Also, 29 percent of Republicans agree that “we need a president who is willing to break some laws if that’s what it takes to set things straight.”
While far from a majority, 29 percent of Republicans translates into millions of people who condone presidential lawlessness. That’s a steep hill to climb for people wanting to save democracy and the rule of law in this country.
Ben Rhodes, former President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, got it right when he warned that the “Democratic Party, in its current form, cannot lead the opposition that is required. ” And he reminds us that we can’t save democracy by “defending the status quo.”
People wanting to save democracy have to link its survival to the lives that Americans live every day. They have to show that if we lose democracy, our lives will be worse. Just ask people in Hungary or Turkey, where the rise of authoritarian leaders has done nothing to cure the social or economic problems that beset those nations.
Saving democracy will require building a broad-based, bipartisan coalition. That means sacrificing ideological purity and tolerating views that we might otherwise condemn.
It requires us to change our habits and focus on building alliances, not enclaves. As the polls now show, that will not be easy.
But we have no choice. We can’t succeed in saving democracy if it is a strictly partisan project.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
